lit ^alts. 



NILE NOTES 



OF A HOWADJI. 



■h^i, 



n-. 



^ 








NEW YORK: 
HARPER & BROTHERS, 

82 CLIFF STREET. 

1851 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, 

BY HARPER & BROTHERS, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New Yorlj. 



i 



u^ 



" A foutra for the world and worldlings base, 
T sing of Africa and golden joys." 

King Henry IF., Part it. 

« or I described 



Great Egypt's flaring sky, or Spain's cork groves." 

Robert Browning's " Paracelsus.''^ 

" If it be asked why it is called the Nile, the answer is, because it has 

beautiful and good water." 

Werners " White mie?'' 

" What then is a Howadji 1" said the Emperor of Ethiopia, draining a 
beaker of crocodile tears. 

" Howadji," replied the astute Arabian, "is our name for merchants, and 
as only merchants travel, we so call travelers." 

" AUah-'hu Ak-bar," said the Emperor of Ethiopia. " God is great." 
Linkum Fidelius^ " Calm Crocodile, or the Sphinx unriddled.''* 

" He saw all the rarities at Caii-o, as also the pyramids, and sailing 

up the Nile, viewed the famous towns on each side of that river." 

Story of Ali Cogia in the Arabian J^Tights. 

" Canopus is afar off, Memnon resoundeth not to the sun, and Nilus 

heareth strange voices." 

Sir Thomas Browne. 

" There can one chat with mummies in a pyramid, and breakfast on 

basilisk's eggs. Thither, then, Homunculus Mandrake, son of the greaV 
Paracelsus ; languish no more in the ignorance of those cUmes, but abroad 
with alembic and crucible, and weigh anchor for Egypt." 

DeatWs Jest Book^ or the FooPs Tragedy. 



f rBfarB. 



When the Persian Poet Hafiz was asked by the Philos- 
opher Zenda what he was good for, he replied — 
"Of what use is a flower?" 

** A flower is good to smell," said the pliilosopher, 
*'And I am good to smell it," said the poet. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAOK 

I. — Going to Boulak, 16 

II.— The Drag-6-men, 23 

III.— Hadji Hamed, . . . . . . . .33 

IV.— The Ibis Sings, 39 

v.— The Crew, 45 

VL— The Ibis Flies, 63 

VII. — The Landscape, . . . • 69 

VIII.— Tracking, 65 

IX.— Flying, 70 

X. — ^Verde Giovane and Fellow Mariners, . . 74 

XI. — ^Verde pitj Giovane, 79 

XII. — AsYOOT, 86 

Xm.— The Sun, ,95 

XrV. — Thebes Triumphant, . . . . . . 101 

XV. — The Crocodile, . . . . . . . .103 

XVI. — Getting Ashore, Ill 

XVII.— Fair Frailty, . . . . . . .114- 

XVIII. — Fair Frailty continued, . . . . 120 

XIX. — KusHUK Arnem, , , 126 

XX.— Terpsichore, , . 133 

XXI.— Sakias, , . .138 



Xll CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXII. — Under the Palms, . . . . . . 143 

XXIIL— Alms! O Shopkeeper! 154 

XXIV.— Syene, ........ 167 

XXV.— Treaty of Syene, 163 

XXVI.— The Cataract, 170 

XXVIL— Nubian Welcome, . 177 

XXVIII.— Phil^, ........ 181 

XXIX. — A Crow that flies in Heaven's Sweetest Air, 188 

XXX.— Southward, 196 

XXXL— Ultima Thule, . 203 

XXXII.— Northward, . . . . . . .212 

XXXIIL— By the Grace of God, . . . . .226 

XXXIV.— Flamingoes, ....... 233 

XXXV.— Cleopatra, .237 

XXXVI.— Memnon, ■ . ' . . 252 

XXXVII.— Dead Kings, . . 260 

XXXVIIL— Buried, ' . 266 

XXXIX.— Dead Queens, . 273 

XL.— Et Cetera, .276 

XLL— The Memnonium, . . . , . . . .280 
XLII. — Medeenet Haboo, . . . . . . 284 

XLIII.— Karnak, 291 

XLIV.— Pruning, . 300 

XLV.— Per Contra, 306 

XLVL— Memphis, 311 

XLVIL— Sunset, 319 



NILE lOTES 



I. 

In a gold and purple December sunset, the Pacha and 
I walked down to the boat at Boulak, the port of Cairo. 
The Pacha was my friend, and it does not concern you, 
gracious reader, to know if he were Sicilian, or Syrian ; 
whether he wore coat or kaftan, had a hareem, or was a 
baleful bachelor. The air was warm, like a May evening 
in Italy. Behind us, the slim minarets of Cairo spired 
shiningly in the brilliance, like the towers of a fairy city, 
under the sunset sea. 

These minarets make the Eastern cities so beautiful. 
The heavy mound-like domes and belfries of western 
Europe are of the earth, earthy. But the mingled mass 
of building, which a city is, soars lightly to the sky in the 
lofty minarets on whose gold crescent crowns the sun 
lingers and lingers, making them the earliest stars of 
evening. 

To our new eyes every thing was picture. Vainly the 
broad road was crowded with Muslim artisans, home- 
returning from their work. To the mere Muslim observer, 
they were carpenters, masons, laborers and tradesmen of 



16 NILE NOTES. 



all kinds. We passed many a meditating Cairene, to 
whom there was nothing but the monotony of an old story 
in that evening and on that road. But we saw all the 
pageantry of oriental romance quietly donkeyirig into 
Cairo. Camels too, swaying and waving like huge phan- 
toms of the twilight, horses with strange gay trappings 
curbed by tawny turbaned equestrians, the peaked toe of 
the red slipper resting in the shovel stirrup. It was a fair 
festal evening. The w^hole world was masquerading, and 
so well that it seemed reality. 

I saw Fadladeen with a gorgeous turban and a gay 
sash. His chibouque, wound with colored silk and gold 
threads, was borne behind him by a black slave. Fat and 
funny was Fadladeen as of old ; and though Fermdrz was 
not by, it was clear to see in the languid droop of his 
eye, that choice Arabian verses were sung by the twilight 
in his mind. 

Yet was Venus still the evening star ; for behind 
him, closely veiled, came Lalla Rookh. . She was wrapped 
in a vast black silken bag, that bulged like a balloon over 
her donkey. But a star-suffused evening cloud was that 
bulky blackness, as her twin eyes shone forth liquidly 
lustrous. 

Abon Hassan sat at the city gate, and I saw Haroun 
Alrashid quietly coming up in that disguise of a Moussoul 
merchant. I could not but wink at Abon, for I knew him 
so long ago in the Arabian Nights. But he rather stared 
than saluted, as friends may, in a masquerade. There 
was Sinbad the porter, too, hurrying to Sinbad the sailor. 



GOING TO BOULAK. 17 

I turned and watched his form fade in the twilight, yet I 
doubt if he reached Bagdad in time for the eighth history. 

Scarce had he passed when a long string of donkeys 
ambled by, bearing each, one of the inflated balloons. It 
was a hareem taking the evening air. A huge eunuch 
was the captain, and rode before. They are bloated, dead- 
eyed creatures, the eunuchs — but there be no eyes ot 
greater importance to marital minds. The ladies came 
gayly after, in single file, chatting together, and although 
Araby's daughters are still born to blush unseen, they 
looked earnestly upon the staring strangers. Did those 
strangers long to behold that hidden beauty ? Could they 
help it if all the softness and sweetness of hidden faces 
radiated from melting eyes ? 

Then came Sakkas — men with hog skins slung over 
their backs, full of water, I remembered the land and 
the time of putting wine into old bottles, and was shoved 
back beyond glass. Pedlers — swarthy fatalists in lovely 
lengths of robe and turban, cried their wares. To our 
Frank ears, it was mere Babel jargon. Yet had erudite 
Mr. Lane accompanied us, Mr. Lane, the eastern English- 
man, who has given us so many golden glimpses into the 
silence and mystery of oriental life, like a good genius re 
vealing to ardent lovers the very hallowed heart of the 
hareem, we should have understood those cries. 

We should have heard " Sycamore figs — Grrapes" — 
meaning that said figs were offered, and the sweetness of 
sense and sound that ^' grape" hath was only bait for the 
attention ; or *' Odors of Paradise, flowers of the 



18 NILE NOTES, 



henna," causing Muslim maidens to tingle to their very- 
nails' ends ; or, indeed, these Pedler Poets, vending water- 
melons, sang, '^ Consoler of the embarrassed, Pips." 
Were they not poets, these pedlers, and full of all oriental 
extravagance ? For the sweet association of poetic names 
shed silvery sheen over the actual article oiFered. The 
unwary philosopher might fancy that he was buying com- 
fort in a green watermelon, and the pietist dream of me- 
mentoes of heaven, in the mere earthly vanity of henna. 

But the philanthropic merchant of sour limes cries, 
" Grod make them light — limes" — meaning not the fruit 
nor the stomach of the purchaser, but his purse. And 
what would the prisoners of the passing black balloons 
say to the ambiguousness of " The work of the bull, 
maidens !" innocently indicating a kind of cotton cloth 
made by bull-moved machinery ? Will they never have 
done with hieroglyphics and sphinxes, these Egyptians ? 
Here a man, rose- embowered, chants, " The rose is a 
thorn, from the sweat of the prophet it bloomed" — mean- 
ing simply, " Fresh roses." 

These are masquerade manners, but they are pleasant. 
The maiden buys not henna only, but a thought of heav- 
en. The poet not watermelons only, but a dream of con- 
solation, which truly he will need. When shall we hear 
in Broadway, " Spring blush of the hillsides, Strawber- 
ries," or " Breast buds of Yenus, milk." Never, never, 
until milkmen are turbaned, and berry- women ballooned. 
A pair of Persians wound among these pedlers, clad in 
their strange costume. They wore high shaggy hats and 



GOING TO BOULAK. 19 

undressed skins, and in their girdles shone silver-mounted 
pistols and daggers. They had come into the West, and 
were loitering along, amazed at what was extremest East 
to us. They had been famous in Gotham, no Muscat en- 
voy more admired. But nobody stared at them here ex- 
cept us. We were the odd and observed. We had strayed 
into the universal revel, and had forgotten to don turbans 
at the gate. Pyramids ! thought I, to be where Persians 
are commonplace. 

In this brilliant bewilderment we played only the part 
of Howadji, which is the universal name for traveler — the 
'' Forestiero" of Italy. It signifies merchant or shopkeeper ; 
and truly the Egyptians must agree with the bilious 
Frenchman that the English are a nation of shopkeepers, 
seeing them swarm forever through his land. For those 
who dwell at Karnak and in the shadow of Memnon, who 
build their mud huts upon the Edfoo Temple, and break 
up Colossi for lime, can not imagine any travel but that 
for direct golden gain. Belzoni was held in the wiser na- 
tive mind to be a mere Dousterswivel of a treasure-hunter. 
Did not Hamed Aga come rushing two days' journey with 
two hundred men, and demand of him that large golden 
cock full of diamonds and pearls? Think how easily the 
Arabian Nights must have come to such men ! Sublime 
stupidity! Egyptians. 

And so advancing, the massively foliaged acacias bow- 
ered us in golden gloom. They fringed and arched the 
long road. Between their trunks, like noble columns of the 
foreground, we saw the pyramids rosier in the westeiii 



20 NILE NOTES 



rosiness. Their forms were sculptured sharply in the 
sunset. We knew that they were on the edge of the 
desert; that their awful shadows darkened the sphinx. 
For so fair and festal is still the evening picture in that 
delicious climate, in that poetic land. We breathed the 
golden air, and it bathed our eyes with new vision. Peach- 
Blossom, who came with us from Malta, solemnly intent 
'' to catch the -spirit of the East/' could not have resisted 
the infection of that enchanted evening. 

I know you will ask me if an Eastern book can not be 
written without a dash of the Arabian Nights, if w^ can 
not get on without Haroun Alrashid. No, impatient 
reader, the East hath throughout that fine flavor. The 
history of Eastern life is embroidered to our youngest eyes 
in that airy arabesque. What to even many of us very 
wise ones is the history of Bagdad, more than the story of 
our revered caliph ? Then the romance of travel is real. 
It is the man going to take possession of the boy's heri- 
tage, those dear dreams of stolen school-hours over wild ro- 
mance ; and in vain would he separate his poetry from his 
prose. Given a turban, a camel or a palm-tree, and 
Zobeide, the Princess Badoura and the youngest brother of 
the Barber step forward into the prose of experience. 

For as we leave the main road and turn finally from 
the towers, whose gold is graying now, behold the parting 
picture and confess the East. 

The moon has gathered the golden light in her shal- 
low cup, and pours it paler over a bivouac of camels, by a 
sheik's white-domed tomb. They growl and blubber as 



GOING TO BOULAK. 21 

they Jineel with their packs of dates and almonds and 
grain, oriental freight mostly, while others are already 
down, still as Sphinxes. The rest sway their curved 
necks silently, and glance contemptuously at the world. 

The drivers, in dark turbans and long white robes coax 
and command. The dome of the sheik's crumbling tomb 
is whiter in the moonhght. The brilliant bustle recedes 
behind those trees. A few Cairenes pass by unnoticing, but 
we are in desert depths. For us all the caravans of all 
Arabian romance are there encamping. 

The Howadji reached at length the Nile, gleaming 
calm in the moonlight. A fleet of river boats lay moored 
to the steep stony bank. The Nile and the pyramids had 
bewitched the night, for it was full of marvelous pictures and 
told tales too fair. Yet do not listen too closely upon 
the shore, lest we hear the plash and plunge of a doomed 
wife or slave. These things have not passed away. This 
luxuriant beauty, this poetry of new impressions, has its 
balance. This tropical sun suckles serpents with the same 
light that adorns the gorgeous flowers. In the lush jun- 
gle, splendid tigers lurk, — ah ! in our poetic Orient beau- 
ty is more beautiful, but deformity more deformed. The 
excellent Effendi or paternal Pacha has twenty or two 
hundred wives, and is, of necessity, unfaithful. But if the 
ballooned Greorgian or Circassian slips up, it is into the 
remorseless river. 

Yet with what solemn shadows do these musings en- 
dow the Egyptian moonlight. They move invisible over 
the face of the waters, and evoke another creation. Co- 



22 NILE NOTES. 



lumbus sailed out of the Mediterranean to a new world. 
We have sailed into it, to a new one. The South seduces 
now, as the West of old. When we reach one end of the 
world, the other has receded into romantic dimness, and 
beckons us backward to explore. The Howadji seek 
Cathay. In the morning, with wide-winged sails, we 
shall fly beyond our history. Listen ! How like a Pedler- 
Poet of Cairo chanting his wares, moans Time through 
the Eternity — *' Cobwebs and fable, history !" 



n. 

As we stepped on board, we should have said, '' In the 
name of Grod, the compassionate, the merciful." For so 
say all pious Muslim, undertaking an arduous task ; and 
so let all pious Howadji exclaim when they set forth 
with any of those " guides, philosophers, and friends," the 
couriers of the Orient — the Dragomen. 

These gentry figure well in the Eastern books. The 
young traveler, already enamored of Eothen's Dhemetri, or 
Warburton's Mahmoud, or Harriet Martineau's Alee, leaps 
ashore expecting to find a very Pythias to his Damon mood, 
and in his constant companion to embrace a concrete Ori- 
ent. These are his Alexandrian emotions and hopes. 
Those poets, Harriet and Eliot, are guilty of much. Pos- 
sibly as the youth descends the Lebanon to Beyrout, five 
months later, he will still confess that it was the concrete 
Orient; but own that he knew not the East, in those 
merely Mediterranean moods of hope and romantic reading. 

The Howadji lands at Alexandria, and is immediately 
invested by long lines of men in bright turbans and bag;gy 
breeches. If you have a slight poetic tendency, it is 



24 NILE NOTES. 



usually too much for you. You succumb to the rainbow 
sash and red slippers. " Which is Alee ?" cry you, in en- 
thusiasm ; and lo ! all are Alee. No, but with Dhemetri 
might there not be rich Eastern material and a brighter 
Eothen ? Yes, but all are Dhemetri. *' Mahmoud, Mah- 
moud !" and the world of baggy breeches responds, '' Yes, 
sir." 

If you are heroic, you dismiss the confusing crowd, and 
then the individuals steal separately and secretly to your 
room and claim an audience. They have volumes of their 
own praise. Traveling Cockaigne has striven to express its 
satisfaction in the most graceful and epigrammatic man- 
ner. The " characters" in all the books have a sonnet-like 
air, each filling its page, and going to the same tune. 
There is no skepticism, and no dragoman has a fault. 
Records of such intelligence, such heroism, such persever- 
ance, honesty, and good cooking, exist in no other litera- 
ture. It is Eothen and the other poets in a more portable 
form. 

Some Howadji can not resist tHe sonnets and the 
slippers, and take the fatal plunge even at Alexandria. 
"Wines and the ecstatic Irish doctor did so under our eyes, 
and returned six weeks later to Cairo, from the upper 
"Nile, with just vigor enough remaining to get rid of their 
man. For the Turkish costume and the fine testimonials 
are only the illuminated initials of the chapter. Yery 
darkly monotonous is the reading that follows. 

The Dragoman is of four species : the Maltese, or the 
able Imave, — the Greek, or the cunning knave, — the 



THE DRAGOMEN. 25 



Syrian, or the active knave, — and the Egyptian, or the 
stupid knave. They wear generally the Eastern costume. 
But the Maltese and the Grreeks often sport bad hats and 
coats, and call themselves Christians. They are the most 
ignorant, vain, incapable, and unsatisfactory class of men 
that the wandering Howadji meets. They travel con- 
stantly the same route, yet have no eyes to see nor ears to 
hear. If on the Nile, they smoke and sleep in the boat. 
If on the desert, they smoke and sleep on the camel. If in 
Syria, they smoke and sleep, if they can, on the horse. It 
is their own comfort — their own convenience and profit, 
which they constantly pursue. The Howadji is a bag of 
treasure thrown by a kind fate upon their shores, and 
they are the wreckers who squeeze, tear, and pull him, 
top, bottom, and sideways, to bleed him of his burden. 

They should be able to give you every information 
about your boat, and what is necessary, and what use- 
less. Much talk you do indeed get, and assurance that 
every thing will be accurately arranged ; but you are 
fairly afloat upon the Nile before you discover how lost 
upon the dragoman have been all his previous voyages. 

With miserable weakness they seek to smooth the 
moment, and perpetually baffle your plans, by telling you 
not the truth, but what they suppose you wish the truth 
to be. Nothing is ever more than an hour or two distant. 
They involve you in absurd arrangements because *' it is 
the custom ;" and he is a hardy Howadji who struggles 
against the vis inertise of ignorant incapacity and misera- 
ble cheating through the whole tour. 



26 NILE NOTES. 



Active intelligence on the Howadji's part is very dis- 
gusting to them. If he scrutinize his expenses, — if he 
pretend to know his own will or way — much more to 
have it executed, the end of things clearly approaches 
to the dragomanio mind. The small knaveries of cheat- 
ing in the price of every thing purchased, and in the 
amount of bucksheesh or gratuity on all occasions, are 
not to be seriously heeded, because they are universal. The 
real evils are the taking you out of your way for their 
own comfort, — ^the favoring a poor resting-place or hotel, 
because they are well paid there,— and the universally 
unreliable information that they afford. Were they good 
servants, it were some consolation. But a servile Eastern 
can not satisfy the Western idea of good service. 

Perhaps it was a bad year for dragomen, as it was for 
potatoes. But such was the result of universal testimony. 

Nero found a GreeJc at Alexandria, whose recommen- 
dations from men known to him were quite enthusias- 
tic. He engaged him, and the dragoman was the sole 
plague of Nero's Egyptian experience, but one combin- 
ing the misery of all the rest. There were Wind and 
Rain, too, whose man was a crack dragoman, and of all 
such, oh ! enthusiastic reader, especially beware. They 
returned to Cairo chanting "miserere — miserere" — and 
in the spring, sought solace in the bosom of the scarlet 
Lady at Jerusalem. For which latter step, however, not 
even irate I, hold the dragoman responsible. 

Mutton Suet's man i'ariiished his Nile larder, at the 
rate of eight boxes of sweet biscuit, and twenty bottles of 



THE DRAGOMEN. 27 

piekles to two towels — a liokerous larder, truly, but I am 
convinced Mutton Suet's man's palate required sharp 
stimulants. 

The little Yerde Griovane and Grunning changed their 
dragoman weekly while they remained at Cairo. The 
difficulty was not all on one side. The dragoman wanted 
to be master, and Verde knew not how to help it, and 
Gunning was ill of a fever. Those excellent Howadji did 
not recover from the East without a course of a half-dozen 
dragomen. 

But most melancholy was the case of a Howadji, whom 
we met wandering in the remote regions of the Nile. He 
was a kind of flying Dutchman, always gliding about in a 
barque haunted by a dragoman, and a Reis or captain, 
who would not suffer him to arrive anywhere. The 
moons of three months had waxed and waned since they 
left Cairo. Winds never blew for that unhappy boat, 
currents were always adverse, — illness and inability seized 
the crew. Landing at lonely towns the* dragoman sold 
him his own provisions, previously sent ashore for the 
purpose, at an admirable advance. Gradually he was 
becoming the Ancient Mariner of the Nile. He must have 
grown grisly, — I am sure that he was sad. 

One day as the fated boat or Dahabieh came spectrally 
eliding over the calm, our dragoman told us the story 
with sardonic smiles, and we looked with awful interest at 
the haunted barque. I saw the demoniac dragoman smok- 
ing by the kitchen, and the crew, faintly rowing, sang the 
slowest of slow songs. The flag, wind-rent and sun- 



28 NILE NOTES, 



bleached, clung in motionless despair to the mast. The 
sails were furled away -almost out of sight. It was a 
windless day, and the sun shone spectrally. 

I looked for the mariner, but saw only a female figure 
in a London bomiet sitting motionless at the cabin window. 

The dragoman-ridden was probably putting on his hat. 
"Was it a game of their despair to play arriving, and getting 
ready to go — for the lady sat as ladies sit in steamers, 
when they near the wharf — or was this only a melancholy 
remembrance of days and places, when they could don hat 
and bonnet, and choose their own way — or simply a mood 
of madness? 

They passed, and we saw them no more. I never heard 
of them again. They are still sailing on doubtless, and you 
will hear the slow song and see the unnecessary bonnet, 
and behold a Howadji buying his own provisions. Say 
" Pax vobisoum" as they pass, nor bless the dragomen. 

I heard but one Howadji speak well of his dragoman, 
and he only comparatively and partially. At Jerusalem 
the Rev. Dr. Duck dismissed his Maltese, and took an 
Egyptian — ^which was the Rev. Dr. Duck's method of 
stepping from the pan into the fire. At the same time 
Eschylus, — not our Grreek, but a modern man of affairs, 
and not easily appalled at circumstances, banished his 
brace of Maltese, and declared that he was wild with 
dragomen, and did not believe a decent one could exist. 

Yet Eschylus, in sad seriousness of purpose to accom- 
plish the East, took another dragoman at Jerusalem, a 
baleful mortal with one eye, and a more able bandit than 



THE DRAGOMEIT. 29 

the rest. For this man Eschylus paid twenty piasters a 
day, board, at the hotel in Jerusalem. Polyphemus request- 
ed him with a noble frankness not to give the money to 
him, but to pay it directly to the landlord in person — mean- 
while he delayed him, and delayed, in Jerusalem, until at 
parting, the landlord with equal frankness told Eschylus, 
that he was obliged to refund to the dragomen every thing 
paid for them, as otherwise he would discover that some 
cat or dog had twitched his table cloths, and destroyed 
whole services of glass and china — and this best hotel in 
the East, was to be discontinued for that and similar 
reasons. For the landlord had sparks of human sympathy 
even with mere Howadji, and the dragomen had sworn 
his ruin. All Howadji were taken to another house, and it 
was only by positive insistance that we reached this. 

Of all the knavery of Polyphemus, this book would not 
contain the history. At the end Eschylus, told him quietly, 
that he had robbed him repeatedly — that since engaging 
him he had heard that he was a noted scamp, — that he 
had been insolent to Madame Eschylus — ^that, in short — 
waxing warm as he perorated, that he was a damned 
rascal. Then he paid him, — for litigation is useless in the 
East, where the Christian word is valueless, — informed 
him that all English Howadji should be informed of his 
name and nature, after which, Polyphemus endeavored to 
kiss his hand I 

Then consider Leisurelie's Domenico Chiesa, Sunday 
Church, " begging your pardon, sir, I am il primo drago- 
mano del mondo, — the first dragoman in the world." 



30 NILE NOTES. 



*' Domenica," said Leisurelie one day in Jerusalem, 
" where is Mount Calvary ?" You know, my young friend 
of fourteen years, that it is in the church of the holy 
sepulcher — but il primo dragomano del mondo waved his 
hand vaguely around the horizon, with his eyes wandering 
about the far blue mountains of Moab, and *' 0, begging 
your pardon, sir, it's there, just there." 

Such are our Arabic interpreters, such your concrete 
Orient. Yet if you believe all your dragoman says — ^if 
you will only believe that he does know something, and 
put your nose into his fingers, you will go very smoothly 
to Beyrout, dripping gold all the way, and then improvise 
a brief pean in the book of sonnets. But if the Howadji 
mean to be master, the romance will unroll like a cloud 
wreath, from that poetic tawny friend, and he will find 
all and more than the faults of an European courier, with 
none of his capacities. 

0, golden-sleeved Commander of the Faithful, what 
a prelude to your praises. For Mohammad was the 
best we saw, and so agreed all who knew him. Dogberry 
was already his Laureate. Mohammad was truly ^' tolera- 
ble and not to be endured." He was ignorant, vain, and 
cowardly, but fairly honest, — extremely good-humored, 
and an abominable cook. He was a devout Muslim, and 
had a pious abhorrence of ham. His deportment was 
grave and pompous, blending the Turkish and Egyptian 
elements of his parentage. Like a child he shrunk and 
shriveled under the least pain or exposure. But he loved 
the high places and the sweet morsels ; and to be called of 



THE DRAGOMEN. 81 

men, Eifendi, dilated his soul with delight. He was 
always well dressed in the Egyptian manner, and bent in 
awful reverence before *' them old Turks" who, surrounded 
by a multitudinous hareem, and an army of slaves, were 
the august peerage of his imagination. 

His great glory, however, was a golden-sleeved bour- 
nouse of goat's hair, presented to him at Damascus by 
some friendly Howadji. This he gathered about him on 
all convenient occasions to create an impression, — at the 
little towns on the Nile, and among the Arabs of the desert, 
how imposing was the golden-sleeved Commander ! Occa- 
sionally he waited at dinner in this robe — and then was 
never Jove so superbly served. Yet the grandeur, as 
usual, was inconsonant with agility, and many a wrecked 
dish of pudding or potatoes paid the penalty of splendor. 

So here our commander of the faithful steps into history, 
goldenly arrayed. Let him not speak for himself. For, 
although his English was intelligible and quite sufficient, 
yet he recognized no auxiliary but *' 6e," and no tense but 
the present. Hence, when he wished to say that the to- 
bacco would be milder when it had absorbed the water, 
he darkly suggested, ''He be better when he be drink 
his water ;" and a huge hulk of iron lying just outside 
Cairo, was " the steamer's saucepan ;" being the boiler of 
a Suez steamer. Nor will the pacha forget that sunny 
Syrian morning, when the commander led us far and far 
out of our way for a '' short cut." Wandering, lost, and 
tangled in flaunting flowers, through long valleys and up 
steep hillsides, we emerged at length upon the path which 



32 NILE NOTES. 



we ought never to have left, and the good commander 
lighting his chibouque w^ith the air of a general lighting 
his cigar after victory, announced impressively, *' I be 
found that way by my sense, by my head !" Too vain to 
ask or to learn, he subjected us to the same inconveniences 
day after day, for the Past disappears from the dragomanio 
mind as utterly as yesterday's landscape from his eye. 

The moon brightened the golden sleeve that first Nile 
evening, as the commander descended the steep bank, 
superintending the embarking of the luggage ; and while 
he spreads the cloth and the crew gather about the kit- 
chen to sing, we will hang in our gallery the portrait of 
his coadjutor, Hadji Hamed, the cook. 



III. 

I WAS donkeying one morning through the bazaars of 
Cairo, looking up at the exquisitely elaborated overhanging 
lattices, wondering if the fences of Paradise were not so 
rarely enwrought, dreaming of the fair Persian slave, 
of the Princess Shemselnihar, the three ladies of Bagdad, 
and other mere star dust, my eye surfeiting itself the 
while with forms and costumes that had hitherto existed 
only in poems and pictures, when I heard suddenly, " Have 
you laid in any potatoes?" and beheld beaming elderly 
John Bull by my side. 

" It occurred to me," said he, " that the long days upon 
the Nile might be a little monotonous, and I thought the 
dinner would be quite an event." 

" Allah!" cried I, as the three ladies of Bagdad faded 
upon my fancy, " I thought we should live on sunsets on 
the Nile." 

The beaming elderly Bull smiled quietly and glanced at 
his gentle rotundity, while I saw bottles, boxes, canisters, 
baskets, and packages of all sizes laid aside in the shop — 
little anti-monotonous arrangements for the Nile. 

B* 



34 NILE NOTES. 



" I hope you have a good cook," said John Bull, as he 
moved placidly away upon his donkey, and was lost in the 
dim depths of the bazaar. 

Truly we were loved of the Prophet, for our cook was 
also a Mohammad, an Alexandrian, and doubtless espe- 
cially favored, not for his name's sake only, but because 
he had been a pilgrim to Mecca, and hence a Hadji forever 
after. It is a Mohammadan title, equivalent to our " ma- 
jor" and '^ colonel" as a term of honor, with this difference, 
that with us it is not always necessary to have been a cap- 
tain to be called such ; but in Arabia is no man a Hadji 
who has not performed the Mecca pilgrimage. "Whether a 
pilgrimage to Paris, and devotion to sundry shrines upon 
the Boulevards, had not been as advantageous to Hadji 
Hamed as kissing the holy Mecca-stone, was a speculation 
which we did not indulge ; for his cuisine was admirable. 

Yet I sometimes fancied the long lankness of the Hadji 
Hamed's figure, streaming in his far-flowing whiteness of 
garment up the Boulevards, and claiming kindred with the 
artistes of the "Cafe" or of the " Maison doree." They 
would needs have sacr^ bleu'd. Yet might the Hadji have 
well challenged them to the " Kara Kooseh," or " Warah 
Mahshee," or the " Yakhnee," nor feared the result. Those 
are the cabalistic names of stuffed gourds, of a kind of mince- 
pie in a pastry of cabbage leaves, and of a stewed meat sea- 
soned with chopped onions. Nor is the Christian palate 
so hopelessly heretic that it can not enjoy those genuine 
Muslim morsels. For we are nothing on the Nile if not 
Eastern. The Egyptians like sweet dishes j even fowls 



HADJI HAMED. 35 



they stuff with raisins, and the rich conclude their repasts 
with draughts of khushaf — a water boiled with raisins 
and sugar, and flavored with rose. Mr. Lane says it is 
the " sweet water" of the Persians. 

And who has dreamed through the Arabian Nights that 
could eat without a thrill, lamb stuffed with pistachio 
nuts, or quaff sherbet of roses, haply of violet, without a 
vision of Haroun's pavilion and his lovely ladies? Is a 
pastry cook's shop, a mere pastry cook's shop when you 
eat cheesecakes there ? Shines not the Syrian sun sud- 
denly over it, making all the world Damascus, and all 
people Agib, and Benreddin Hassan, and the lady of beau- 
ty ? Even in these slightest details no region is so purely 
the property of the imagination as the East. AYe know it 
only in poetry, and although there is dirt and direful de- 
formity, the traveler sees it no more than the fast-flying 
swallow, to whom the dreadful mountain abysses and 
dumb deserts are but soft shadows and shining lights in 
his air-seen picture of the world. 

The materials for this poetic Eastern larder are very 
few upon the Nile ; chickens and mutton are the staple, 
and chance pigeons shot on the shore, during a morning's 
stroll. The genius of the artiste is shown in his adroit 
arrangement and concealment of this monotonous material. 
Hadji Hamed's genius was Italian, and every dinner 
was a success. He made every dinner the event which 
Bull was convinced it would be, or ought to be : and, per- 
haps, after all, the Hadji's soft custard was much the 
same as the sunset diet of which, in those Cairo days, I 
dreamed. 



36 NILE NOTES 



Our own larder was very limited ; for as we sailed 
slowly along those shores of sleep, we observed too intense 
an intimacy of the goats with the sheep. 

The white bearded goats wandered too much at their 
own sweet will with the unsuspecting lambs, or the not 
all unwilling elderly sheep. The natives are not fastidi- 
ous, and do not mind a mellow goat flavor. They drink a 
favorite broth made of the head, feet, skin, wool, and hoofs, 
thrust into a pot and half boiled. Then they eat with unc- 
tion, the unctuous remains. We began bravely with roast 
and boiled ; but orders were issued at length, that no more 
sheep should be bought, so sadly convinced were the Ho- 
wadji that evil communications corrupt good mutton. 

Yet in Herodotean days, the goats were sacred to one 
part of Egypt and sheep to another. The Thebans ab- 
stained from sheep, and sacrificed goats only. For they 
said, that Hercules was very desirous of seeing Jupiter, 
but Jupiter was unwilling to be seen. As Hercules per- 
sisted, however, Jupiter flayed a ram, cut off the head 
and held it before his face, and having donned the fleece, 
so showed himself to Hercules — ^hence, our familiar Ju- 
piter Ammon. 

But those of the Mendesian district, still says Herodo- 
tus, abstained from goats and sacrificed sheep. For they 
said that Pan was one of the original eight gods, and their 
sculptors and painters represented him with the face and 
legs of a goat. Why they did so, Herodotus prefers not 
to mention; as, indeed, our good father of history was 
so careful of his children's morals, that he usually pre- 



HADJI HAMED. 37 



ferred not to mention precisely what they most wish to 
know. 

It is curious to find that the elder Egyptians had the 
Jewish and Mohammadan horror of swine. The swine- 
herds were a separate race, like the headsmen of some 
modern lands, and married among themselves. Herodotus 
knows, as usual, why swine were abhorred, except on the 
festivals of the moon and of Bacchus, but as usual con- 
siders it more becoming not to mention the reason. 

Is it not strange, as we sweep up the broad river, to 
see the figure of that genial, garrulous, old gossip, stalking 
vaguely through the dim morning twilight of history, 
plainly seeing what we can never know, audibly convers- 
ing with us of what he will, but ignoring what we wish, 
and answering no questions forever ? One of the profound- 
est mysteries of the Egyptian belief, and in lesser de- 
grees of all antique faiths, constantly and especially sym- 
bolized throughout Egypt, Herodotus evidently knew per- 
fectly from his friendship with the priests, but perpetu- 
ally his conscience dictates silence — -Amen, O venerable 
Father. 

I knew some bold Howadji who essayed a croco- 
dile banquet. They were served with crocodile chops and 
steaks, and crocodile boiled, roasted, and stewed. They 
talked very cheerfully of it afterward ; but each one pri- 
vately confessed that the flesh tasted like abortive lobster, 
saturated with musk. 

Hadji Hamed cooked no crocodile, and had no golden- 
sleeved garment. He wore 'eree or cotton drawers, past 



88 NILE NOTES. 



their prime, and evidently originally made for lesser legs. 
That first evening he fluttered about the deck in a long 
white robe, like a solemn-faced wag playing ghost in a 
churchyard. By day he looked like a bird of prey, with 
long legs and a hooked bill. 



IV. 

€)}t Shis #itig3. 

"While the Hadji Hamed fluttered about the deck, and 
the commander served his kara kooseh, the crew gathered 
around the bow and sang. 

The stillness of early evening had spelled the river, nor 
was the strangeness dissolved by that singing. The men 
crouched in a circle upon the deck, and the reis, or cap- 
tain, thrummed the tarabuka, or Arab drum, made of a 
fish-skin stretched upon a gourd. Raising their hands, 
the crew clapped them above their heads, in perfect time, 
not ringingly, but with a dead dull thump of the palms — 
moving the whole arm to bring them together. They 
swung their heads from side to side, and one clanked a 
chain in unison. So did these people long before the Ibis 
nestled to this bank, long before there were Americans to 
listen. 

For when Diana was divine, and thousands of men and 
women came floating down the Nile in barges to celebrate 
her festival, they sang and clapped, played the castanets 
and flute, stifling the voices of Arabian and Lybian echoes 
with a wild roar of revelry. They, too, sang a song that 



40 NILE NOTES. 



came to them from an -unknown antiquity, Linus, their 
first and only song, the dirge of the son of the first king of 
Egypt. 

This might have been that dirge that the crew sang in 
a mournful minor. Suddenly one rose and led the song, 
in sharp jagged sounds, formless as lightning. " He fills 
me the glass full and gives me to drink," sang the leader, 
and the low measured chorus throbbed after him, " Hum- 
meleager malooshee." The sounds were not a tune, but a 
kind of measured recitative. It went on constantly faster 
and faster, exciting them, as the Shakers excite them- 
selves, until a tall gaunt Nubian rose in the moonlight 
and danced in the center of the circle, like a gay ghoul 
among his fellows. 

The dancing was monotonous, like the singing, a sim- 
ple jerking of the muscles. He shook his arms from the 
elbows like a Shaker, and raised himself alternately upon 
both feet. Often the leader repeated the song as a solo, then 
the voices died away, the ghoul crouched again, and the 
hollow throb of the tarabuka continued as an accompani- 
ment to the distant singing of Nero's crew, that came in 
fitful gusts through the little grove of sharp slim masts — 

" If you meet my sweetheart, 
Give her my respects." 

The melancholy monotony of this singing in unison, har- 
monized with the vague feelings of that first Nile night. 
The simplicity of the words became the perpetual child- 



THE IBIS SINGS. 41 

ishness of the men, so that it was not ludicrous. It was 
clearly the music and words of a race just better than 
the brutes. If a poet could translate into sound the ex- 
pression of a fine dog's face, or that of a meditative cow, 
the Howadji would fancy that he heard Nile music. For, 
after all, that placid and perfect animal expression would 
be melancholy humanity. And with the crew only the 
sound was sad ; they smiled and grinned and shook their 
heads with intense satisfaction. The evening and the 
scene were like a chapter of Mungo Park. I heard the 
African mother sing to him as he lay sick upon her mats, 
and the world and history forgotten, those strange sad 
sounds drew me deep into the dumb mystery of Africa. 

But the musical Howadji will find a fearful void in his 
Eastern life. The Asiatic has no ear and no soul for music. 
Like other savages and children, he loves a noise and he 
plays on shrill pipes — on the tarabuka, on the tar or tam- 
bourine, and a sharp one-stringed fiddle, or rabab. Of 
course in your first oriental days, you will decline no invi- 
tation, but you will grow gradually deaf to all entreaties 
of friends or dragomen to sally forth and hear music. You 
will remind him that you did not come to the East to go 
to Bedlam. 

This want of music is not strange, for silence is natural 
to the East and the tropics. When, sitting quietly at 
home, in midsummer, sweeping ever sunward in the grow- 
ing heats, we at length reach the tropics in the fixed fervor 
of a July noon, the day is rapt, the birds are still, the wind 
swoons, and the burning sun glares silence on the world. 



42 NILE NOTES. 



The Orient is that primeval and perpetual noon. That 
very heat explains to you the voluptuous elaboration of its 
architecture, the brilliance of its costume, the picturesque- 
ness of its life. But no Mozart was needed to sow Per- 
sian gardens with roses breathing love and beauty, no Bee- 
thoven to build mighty Himalayas, on Rossini to spar- 
kle and sing with the birds and streams. Those realities 
are there, of which the composers are the poets to Western 
imaginations. In the East, you feel and see music, but 
hear it never. 

Yet in Cairo and Damascus the poets sit at the cafes, 
surrounded by the forms and colors of their songs, and re- 
cite the romances of the Arabian Nights, or of Aboo Zeyd, 
or of Antar, with no other accompaniment than the Tar or 
the Eabab, then called the " Poet's Viol," and in the same 
monotonous strain. Sometimes the single strain is touch- 
ing, as when on our way to Jerusalem, the too enamored 
camel-driver, leading the litter of the fair Armenian, sad- 
dened the silence of the desert noon with a Syrian song. 
The high shrill notes trembled and rang on the air. The 
words said little, but the sound was a lyric of sorrow. 
The fair Armenian listened silently as the caravan wound 
slowly along, her eyes musily fixed upon the East, where 
the flower-fringed Euphrates flows through Bagdad to the 
sea. The fair Armenian had her thoughts and the camel- 
driver his ; also the accompanying Howadji listened and 
had theirs. 

The Syrian songs of the desert are very sad. They 
harmonize with the burning monotony of the landscape 



THEIBISSINGS. 43 

in their long recitative and shrill wail. The camel steps 
more willingly to that music, but the Howadji swaying 
upon his back is tranced in the sound, so naturally born 
of silence. 

Meanwhile our crew are singing, although we have 
slid upon their music, and the moonlight, far forward into 
the desert. But these are the forms and feelings that 
their singing suggested. "While they sang I wandered over 
Sahara, and was lost in the lonely Libyan hills, — a thou- 
sand simple stories, a thousand ballads of love and woe 
trooped like drooping birds through the sky-like vagueness 
of my mind. Rosamond Grrey, and the child of EUe 
passed phantom-like with vailed faces, — for love, arid sor- 
row, and delight are cosmopolitan, building bowers indis- 
criminately of palm-trees or of pines. 

The voices died away like the Muezzins', whose cry is 
the sweetest and most striking of all Eastern sounds. It 
trembles in long rising and falling cadences from the bal- 
cony of the Minaret, more humanly alluring than bells, 
and more respectful of the warm stillness of Syrian and 
Egyptian days. Heard in Jerusalem it has especial power. 
You sit upon your housetop reading the history whose 
profoundest significance is simple and natural in that 
inspiring clime — and as your eye wanders from the aeriel 
dome of Omar, beautiful enough to have been a dome of 
Solomon's Temple, and over the olives of Grethsemana 
climbs the Mount of Olives — the balmy air is suddenly 
filled with a murmurous cry like a cheek suddenly rose- 
suffused — a sound near, and far, and everywhere, but soft 



44 NILE NOTES. 



and vibrating and alluring, until you would fain don tur- 
ban, kaftan, and slippers, and kneeling in the shadow of a 
cypress on the sun-flooded marble court of Omar, would be 
the mediator of those faiths, nor feel yourself a recreant 
Christian. 

Once I heard the Muezzin cry from a little village on 
the edge of the desert, in the starlight before the dawn. 
It was only a wailing voice in the air. The spirits of the 
desert were addressed in their own language, — or was it 
themselves lamenting, like water spirits to the green 
boughs overhanging them, that they could never know the 
gladness of the green world, but were forever demons and 
denizens of the desert ? But the tones trembled away 
without echo or response into the starry solitude;— Al-la-hu 
Ak-bar, Al-la-hu Ak-bar ! 

So with songs and pictures, with musings, and the 
dinner of a Mecca pilgrim, passed the first evening upon 
the Nile. The Ibis clung to the bank at Boulak all that 
night. "We called her Ibis because the sharp lateen sails 
are most like wings, and upon the Egyptian Nile was no 
winged thing of fairer fame. "We prayed Osiris that the 
law of his religion might yet be enforced against winds 
and waves. For whoever killed an Ibis, by accident or 
willfully, necessarily suffered death. 

The Lotus is a sweeter name, but consider all the Poets 
who have so baptized their boats ! Besides, soothly say- 
ing, this Dahabieh of ours, hath no flower semblance, and 
is rather fat than fairy. The zealous have even called 
their craft Papyrus^ but poverty has no law. 



€^t CrBttt. 

We are not quite off, yet. Eastern life is leisurely. It 
has the long crane neck of enjoyment — and you, impatient 
reader, must leave your hasty habits, and no longer bolt 
your pleasure as you do your Tremont or Astor dinner, but 
taste it all the way down, as our turbaned friends do. 
Ask your dragoman casually, and he will regale you 
with choice instances of this happy habitude of the Orien- 
tals^ — or read the Arabian Nights in the original, or under- 
stand literally the romances that the Poets recite at the 
Cafes, and you will learn how much you are born to lose-^ 
being born as you were, an American, with no time to 
live. 

Your Nile crew is a dozen Nondescripts. They are 
Arabs — Egyptians — Nubians and half-breeds of all kinds. 
They wear a white or red cap, and a long flowing garment 
which the Howadji naturally calls '' Night-gown," but 
which they term " Zaaboot" — although as Mrs. Bull said, 
she thought Night-gown the better name. It is a con- 
venient dress for river mariners, for they have only to 
throw it off, and are at once ready to leap into the stream 



46 NILE NOTES, 



if the boat grounds — with no more incumbrance than Un- 
dine's uncle Kiihleborn always had. On great occasions of 
reaching a town they wear the 'eree or drawers, and a 
turban of white cotton. 

Our Reis was a placid little Nubian, with illimitable 
lips, and a round, soft eye. He was a feminine creature, 
and crept felinely about the boat on his little spongy feet, 
often sitting all day upon the bow, somnolently smoking 
his chibouque, and letting us run aground. He was a 
Hadji too; but, except that he did no work, seemed to 
have no especial respect from the crew. He put his finger 
in the dish with them, and fared no better. Had he been 
a burly brute, the savages would have feared him; and, 
with them, fear is the synonym of respect. 

The grisly Ancient Mariner was the real captain — an 
old, gray Egyptian, who crouched all day long over the 
tiller, with a pipe in his mouth, and his firm eye fixed 
upon the river and the shore. He looked like a heap of 
ragged blankets, smoldering away internally, and emitting 
smoke at a chance orifice. But at evening he descended 
to the deck, took a cup of coffee, and chatted till mid- 
night. As long as the wind held to the sail, he held to the 
tiller. The Ancient Mariner was the real worker of the 
Ibis, and never made faces at it, although the crew be- 
moaned often enough their hard fate. Of course, he tried 
to cheat at first, but when he felt the eye of the Pacha 
looking through him and turning up his little cunning, he 
tried it no more, or only spasmodically, at intervals, from 
habit. 



THE CREW. 47 



Brawny, one-eyed Seyd was first officer, the leader of 
the working chorus and of the hard pulling and pushing. 
He had put out his own eye, like other Egyptians, many 
of whom did the same office to their children to escape Mo- 
hammad Alee's conscription. He was a good-natured, 
clumsy boor — a being in the ape stage of development. 
He proved the veracity of the "Vestiges," that we begin 
in a fishy state, and advance through the tailed and 
winged ones. '' We have had fins, we may have wings." 
I doubt if Seyd had yet fairly taken in his tail — he was 
growing. Had I been a German naturalist, I should have 
seized the good Seyd and presented him to some "Durch- 
lauchtiger," king or kaiser, as an ourang-outang from the 
white Nile ; and I am sure the Teutons would have de- 
creed it, a " sehr ausgezeichnete" specimen. 

Seyd, I fear, was slightly sensual. He had ulterior 
views upon the kitchen drippings. While the Howadji 
dined, he sat like an ourang-outang, gazing with ludicrous 
intensity at the lickerous morsels, then shifted into some 
clumsier squat, so that the Howadji could not maintain 
becoming gravity. At times he imbibed cups of coffee 
privately in the kitchen regions, then gurgled his cocoa- 
nut nargileh with spasmodic vigor. 

Seyd fulfilled other functions not strictly within his 
official walk. He washed the deck, brought coals to the 
chibouque, cleaned the knives and scraped kettles and pans. 
But after much watching, I feared that Seyd was going 
backward — developing the wrong way, for he became more 
baboonish and less human every day. His feet were in- 



48 NILE NOTES, 



credible. I had not seen the colossi then. Generally, he 
was barefooted. But sometimes, goddess of Paris kids ! 
he essayed slippers. Then no bemired camel ever extri- 
cated himself more ponderously pedaled. These leather 
cases, that might have been heir-looms of Memnon, were 
the completion of his full dress. Ah ! Brummell ! Seyd 
en grande tenue was a stately spectacle. 

There was Saleh or Satan, a cross between the porcu- 
pine and the wild-cat, whom I disliked as devoutly as the 
Rev. Dr. Duck did the devil. And Aboo Seyd, a little 
old-maidish Bedoueen, who told wonderful stories to the 
crew and prayed endlessly. He was very vain and dire- 
fully ugly, short and speckled and squat. On the Nile I 
believed in necromancy, and knew Aboo Seyd to be really 
a tree-toad humanized. I speculated vainly upon' his 
vanity. It was the only case where I never could suspect 
the secret. 

Great gawky Abdallah then, G-od's favorite as his 
name imports, and a trusty mastiff of a man. Abdallah 
had few human characteristics, and was much quizzed by 
the crew under Satan's lead. He was invaluable for 
plunging among the grass and bushes, or into the water 
for pigeons which the Pacha had shot. And he loved his 
townsman Aboo Tar, or Congo, as we called him, as if his 
heart were as huge as his body. Congo was the youngest 
and brightest of the crew. He was black and slim, and 
although not graceful, moved rapidly and worked well. 
The little Congo was the only one of the crew who in- 
spired human interest. 



THE CREW, 49 



They are all bad workers, and lazy exceedingly. 
Never was seen such confused imbecility of action and 
noise, as in the shifting of sail. The ropes are twisted 
and tangled, and the red and black legs are twisted and 
tangled in the trouble to extricate them. Meanwhile the 
boat comes into the wind, the great sails flap fiercely, mad 
to be deprived of it; the boats that had drifted behind 
come up, even pass, and the Pacha, wrapped in his capote, 
swears a little to ease his mind. 

Yet that Nile poet, Harriet Martineau, speaks of the 
"savage faculty" in Egypt. But "faculty" is a Western 
gift. Savages with faculty may become a leading race. 
But a leading race never degenerates, so long as faculty 
remains. The Egyptians and Easterns are not savages, 
they are imbeciles. It is the English fashion to laud the 
Orient, and to prophesy a renewed grandeur, as if the 
East could ever again be as bright as at sunrise. The 
Easterns are picturesque and handsome, as. is no nation 
with faculty. The coarse costume of a Nile sailor shames 
in dignity and grace the most elaborate toilet of Western sa- 
loons. It is drapery whose grace all men admire, and which 
all artists study in the antique. Western life is clean and 
comely and comfortable, but it is not picturesque. 

Therefore, if you would enjoy the land, you must be a 
poet, and not a philosopher. To the hurrying Howadji, 
the prominent interest is the picturesque one. For any 
other purpose, he need not be there. Be a pilgrim of 
beauty and not of morals or of politics, if you would real- 
ize your dream. History sheds moonlight over the an- 

C 



50 NILE NOTES. 



tique years of Egypt, and by that light you can not study. 
Believe before you begin, that the gTeat Asian mystery 
which D'Israeli's mild-minded Tancred sought to pene- 
trate, is the mystery of death. If you do not, then settle 
it upon the data you have at home, for unless you come 
able and prepared for profoundest research and observa- 
tion, a rapid journey through a land whose manners and 
language you do not understand, and whose spirit is ut- 
terly novel to you, will ill qualify you to discourse of its 
fate and position. 

That the East will never regenerate itself, cotempo- 
rary history shows ; nor has any nation of history culmi- 
nated twice. The spent summer reblooms no more — ^the 
Indian summer is but a memory and a delusion. The 
sole hope of the East is Western inoculation. The child 
must suckle the age of the parent, and even " Medea's 
wondrous alchemy" will not restore its peculiar prime. If 
the East awakens, it will be no longer in the turban and 
red slippers, but in hat and boots. The "West is the sea 
that advances forever upon the shore, the shore can not 
stay it, but becomes the bottom of the ocean. The West- 
ern, who lives in the Orient, does not assume the kaftan 
and the baggy breeches, and those of his Muslim neigh- 
bors shrink and disappear before his coat and pantaloons. 
The Turkish army is clothed like the armies of Europe. 
The grand Turk himself, Mohammad's vicar, the Com- 
mander of the Faithful, has laid away the magnificence 
of Haroun Alrashid, and wears the simple red Tarboosh, 
and a stiff suit of military blue. Cairo is an English sta- 



THE CREW. 61 



tion to India, and the Howadji does not drink sherbet upon 
the pyramids, but champagne. The choice Cairo of our 
Eastern imagination is contaminated with carriages. They 
are showing the secrets of the streets to the sun. Their 
silence is no longer murmurous, but rattling. The Uzbee- 
keeyah, public promenade of Cairo, is a tea garden, of a 
Sunday afternoon crowded with ungainly Franks, listen- 
ing to bad music. Ichabod, Ichabod ! steam has towed , 
the Mediterranean up the Nile to Boulak, and as you move 
on to Cairo, through the still surviving masquerade of the 
Orient, the cry of the melon-merchant seems the signifi- 
cant cry of each sad-eyed Oriental, " Consoler of the em- 
barrassed, Pips !" 

The century has seen the failure of the Eastern experi- 
ment, headed as it is not likely to be headed again, by an 
able and wise leader. Mohammad Alee had mastered 
Egypt and Syria, and was mounting the steps of the sul- 
tan's throne. Then he would have marched to Bagdad, 
and sat down in Haroun Alrashid's seat, to draw again 
broader and more deeply the lines of the old Eastern em- 
pire. But the West would not suffer it. Even had it done 
so, the world of Mohammad Alee would have crumbled to, 
chaos again when he died, for it existed only by his im- 
perial will, and not by the perception of the people. 

At this moment the East is the El Dorado of European 
political hope. No single power dares to grasp it, but at 
last England and Russia will meet there, face to face, 
and the lion and the polar bear will shiver the desert si- 
lence with the roar of their struggle. It will be the re- 



52 NILE NOTES 



turn of the children to claim the birthplace. They may- 
quarrel among themselves, but whoever wins, will intro- 
duce the life of the children and not of the parent. A pos- 
session and a province it may be, but no more an indepen- 
dent empire. Father Ishmael shall be a sheikh of honor, 
but of dominion no longer, and sit turbaned in the chimney 
corner, while his hatted heirs rule the house. The children 
will cluster around him, fascinated with his beautiful tra- 
ditions, and curiously compare their little black shoes with 
his red slippers. 

Here, then, we throw overboard from the Ibis all 
solemn speculation, reserving only for ballast this chapter 
of erudite Eastern reflection and prophecy. The shade of 
the Poet Martineau moves awfully along these clay ter- 
races, and pauses minatory under the palms, declaring 
that " He who derives from his travels nothing but pic- 
turesque and amusing impressions * ^ ^ uses like a 
child, a most serious and manlike privilege." 

It is reproving, but some can paint, and some can 
preach. Poet Harriet, so runs the world away. That 
group of palms waving feathery in the moonlight over the 
gleaming river is more soul-solacing than much conclu- 
sive speculation. 



VI. 

€^t 31110 /liB0, 

At noon the wind rose. The Ibis shook out her wings, 
spread them and stood into the stream. Nero was already 
off. 

Stretching before us southward were endless groups 
of masts and sails. Palms fringed the western shore, 
and on the east, rose the handsome summer palaces af 
Pachas and rich men. They were deep retired in full 
foliaged groves and gardens, or rose white and shining 
directly over the water. The verandahs were shaded with 
cool, dark-green blinds, and spacious steps descended 
stately to the water, as proudly as from Venetian palaces. 
Graceful boats lay moored to the marge, the lustrous dark- 
ness of acacias shadowed the shore, and an occasional 
sakia or water-wheel began the monotonous music of the 
river. 

Behind us from the city, rose the alabaster minarets 
of the citadel Mosque— snow spires in the deep blue — and 
the aerial elegance of the minor minarets mingling with 
palms, that seemed to grow in unknown hanging-gardens 
of delight, were already a graceful arabesque upon the 



54 NILE NOTES. 



sky. The pyramids watched us as we went — staring 
themselves stonily into memory forever. The great green 
plain between us, came gently to the water, over whose 
calm gleam skimmed the Ibis with almost conscious de- 
light that she was flying to the South. The Howadji, 
meanwhile, fascinated with the fair auspices of their voy- 
age, sat cross-legged upon Persian carpets sipping mellow 
mocha, and smoking the cherry-sticked chibouque. 

As life without love, said the Cairene Poet to me as 
I ordered his Nargileh to be refilled with Tumback — choice 
Persian tobacco — is the chibouque without coffee. And 
as I sipped that mocha, and perceived that for the first 
time I was drinking coffee, I felt that all Hadji Hamed's 
solemnity and painful Mecca pilgrimages v/ere not pur- 
poseless nor without ambition. Why should not he pre- 
pare coffee for the clioicest coterie of houris even in the 
Prophet's celestial pavilion? For a smoother sip is not 
offered the Prophet by his fairest favorite, than his name- 
sake prepared, and his other namesake offered to us on 
each Nile day. 

The mocha is so fragrant and rich, and so perfectly 
prepared, that the sweetness of sugar seems at length 
quite coarse and unnecessary. It destroys the most deli- 
cate delight of the palate, which craves at last the purest 
flavor of the berry, and tastes all Arabia Felix therein. A 
glass of imperial Tokay in Hungary, and a fingan of mocha 
in the East, are the most poetic and inspiring draughts. 
Whether the Grreek poets, born between the two, did not 
foreshadow the fascination of each, when they celebrated 



THE IBIS FLIES. 65 

nectar and ambrosia as divine delights, I leave to the 
most erudite Teutonic commentator. Sure am I that the 
delight pf well-prepared mocha transcends the sphere of 
sense, and rises into a spiritual satisfaction — or is it that 
mocha is the magic that spiritualizes sense ? 

Yet it must be sipped from the fingan poised in the 
delicate zarf. The fingan is a small blue and gold cup, 
or of any color, of an egg's caliber, borne upon an ex- 
quisitely wrought support of gold or silver. The mouth 
must slide from the cup's brim to the amber mouth-piece 
of the chibouque, drawing thence azure clouds of latakia, 
the sweet mild weed of Syria. Then, wildered Western, 
you taste the Orient, and awake in dreams. 

So waned the afternoon, .as we glided gently before a 
failing breeze, between the green levels of the Nile valley. 
The river was lively with boats. Dignified Dahabieh 
sweeping along like Pachas of importance and of endless 
tails. Crafty little Cangie, smaller barques, creeping on 
like Effendi of lesser rank. The far rippling reaches were 
white with the sharp saucy sails, bending over and over, 
reproaching the water for its resistance, and, like us, pur- 
suing the South. The craft was of every kind. Huge 
lumbering country boats, freighted with filth and vermin, 
covered with crouching figures in blankets, or laden with 
grain; or there were boats curiously crowded, the little 
cabin windows overflowing with human blackness and 
semi-naked boys and girls, sitting in close rows upon the 
deck. 

These are first class frigates of the Devil's navy. They 



56 NILE NOTES. 



are slave boats floating down from Dongola and Sennaar. 
The wind does not blow for them. They alone are not 
white with sails, and running merrily over the water, but 
they drift slowly, slowly with the weary beat of a few oars. 

The little slaves stare at us with more wonder than we 
look at them. They are not pensive or silent. They smile 
and chat, arid point at the Howadji and the novelties of the 
Nile very contentedly. Not one kneels and inquires if he 
is not a man and a brother, and the Venuses, " carved in 
ebony," seem fully satisfied with their crisp, closely curl- 
ing hair, smeared with castor oil. In Egypt and the East 
generally, slavery does not appear so sadly as elsewhere. 
The contrasts are not so vivid. It seems only an accident 
that one is master and the other slave. A reverse of rela- 
tions would not appear strange, for the master is as igno- 
rant and brutal as the servant. 

Yet a group of disgusting figures lean and lounge upon 
the upper deck, or cabin roof. Nature, in justice to her- 
self, has discharged humanity from their faces — only the 
human form remains — for there is nothing so revolting as 
a slave-driver with his booty bagged. In the chase, there 
may be excitement and danger, but the chase once suc- 
cessful, they sink into a torpidity of badness. But this is 
only a cloud floating athwart the setting sun. To our 
nev/ Nile eyes, this is only proof that there are crocodiles 
beyond^ — ^happily not so repulsive, for they are not in the 
human shape. 

The slavers passed and the sun set over the gleaming 
river. A solitary heron stood upon a sandy point. In a 



THE IBIS FLIES. 67 

broad beautiful bay beyond, the thin lines of masts were 
drawn dark against the sky. Palms, and the dim lines of 
Arabian hills dreamed in the tranquil airj a few boats 
clung to the western bank, that descended in easy clay 
terraces to the water, their sails hanging in the dying 
wind. Suddenly we were among them, close under the 
bank. 

The moon sloped westward behind a group of palms, 
and the spell was upon us. We had drifted into the dream 
world. From the ghostly highlands and the low shore, 
came the baying of dogs, mellowed by distance and the 
moonlight into the weird measures of a black forest hunt- 
ing. Drifted away from the world, yet, like Ferdinand, 
moved by voiceless music in the moonlight. 

" Come unto these yellow sands, 
And then take hands — , - 
Curtsied when you have, and list, 
(The wild waves whist,) 

Foot it featly here and there, . ' 

And sw«et sprites the burden bear. 
Hark, hark ! 
The watch-dog's bark." 

Such aerial witchery was in the night, for our Shakspeare 
was a Nile necromancer as well. Drifted beyond the 
world, yet not beyond the Poet. Flutes, too, were blown 
upon the shore, and horns and the chorus of a crew camo 
sadly across the water with the faint throb of the tara- 
buka. Under those warm southern stars, was a sense of 
solitude and isolation. Might we not even behold the 



68 NILE NOTES. 



southern cross, when the clouds of Latakia rolled away ? 
Our own crew were silent, but a belated boat struggling 
for a berth among our fleet, disturbed the slumbers of a 
neighboring crew. One sharp, fierce cackle of dispute sud- 
denly shattered the silence like a tropical whirlwind, nor 
was it stiller by the blows mutually bestowed. Our chat 
of Bagdad and the desert was for a moment suspended. 
Nor did we wonder at the struggle, since Mars shone so 
redly over. But it died away as suddenly, and inexplica- 
bly mournful as the sphinx's smile, streamed the setting 
moonlight over the world. Not a ripple of Western feeling 
reached that repose. We were in the dream of the death 
of the deadest land. 



VII. 

The Nile landscape is not monotonous, although of one 
general character. In that soft air the lines change con- 
stantly, but imperceptibly, and are always so delicately 
lined and drawn, that the eye swims satisfied along the 
warm tranquillity of the scenery. 

Egypt is the valley of the Nile. At its widest part it 
is, perhaps, six or seven miles broad, and is walled upon 
the west by the Libyan mountains, and upon the east by 
the Arabian. The scenery is simple and grand. The 
forms of the landscape harmonize with the forms of the 
impression of Egypt in the mind. Solemn and still and 
inexplicable sits that antique mystery among the flowery 
fancies and broad green fertile feelings of your mind and 
contemporary life, as the sphinx sits upon the edge of the 
grain-green plain. No scenery is grander in its impres- 
sion, for none is so symbolical. The land seems to have 
died with the race that made it famous — it is so solemnly 
still. Day after day unrolls to the eye the perpetual pan- 
orama of fields wdde- waving with the tobacco, and glitter- 
ing with the golden-blossomed cotton, among which half- 



GO NILE NOTES. 



naked men and women are lazily working. Palm-groves 
stand, each palm a poem, brimming your memory with 
beauty. You know from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, whose 
volumes are here your best tutor, that you are passing the 
remains of ancient cities, as the Ibis loiters languidly be- 
fore the rising and falling north wind, or is wearily drawn 
along by the crew filing along the shore. An occasional 
irregular reach of mounds and a bit of crumbling wall 
distract imagination as much with the future as the past, 
straining to realize the time when New York shall be an 
irregular reach of mounds, or a bit of crumbling wall. 

Impossible? Possibly. But are we so loved of time, 
we petted youngest child, that the fate of his eldest gor- 
geous Asia, and Africa, its swart mysterious twin shall 
only frown at us through them and fly ? 

The austere Arabian mountains leave Cairo with us, 
and stretch in sad monotony of strength along the Eastern 
shore. There they shine sandily, the mighty advanced 
guard of the desert. " Here," say they, and plant their 
stern feet forever, and over their shoulders sweep and sing 
the low wild winds from mid Arabia, '' sand-grains out- 
numbering all thy dear drops of water are behind us, to 
maintain our might and subdue thee, fond, fair river I" 

But it glides unheeded at their base, lithely swing- 
ing its long unbroken phalanx of sweet water — waving 
gently against the immovable cliffs like palm branches 
of peace against a foe's serried front. 

Presently the Libyan heights appear, and the river is 
invested. A sense of fate then spells you, and you feel 



THE LANDSCAPE. 61 

that the two powers must measure their might at last, 
and go forward to the cataract with the feeling of one who 
shall behold terrible battles. 

Yet the day, mindful only of beauty, lavishes all its 
light upon the mighty foes, adorning them each impar- 
tially for its own delight. Along the uniform Arabian 
highland, it swims and flashes, and fades in exquisite 
hues, magically making it the sapphire wall of that garden 
of imagination, which fertile Arabia is ; or in the full gush 
of noon standing it along the eastern horizon as an image 
of those boundless deserts, which no man can conceive, 
more than the sea, until he beholds them. 

But the advancing desert consumes cities of the river, 
so that fair fames of eldest history are now mere names. 
Even^the perplexed river sweeps away its own, but reveals 
richer reaches of green land for the old lost, and Arabia 
and Lybia are foiled forever. Forever, for it must be as it 
has been, until the fertility of the tropics that floats sea- 
ward in the Nile, making the land of Egypt as it goes, is 
exhausted in its source. 

But there is a profounder charm in the landscape, a 
beauty that grows more slowly into the mind, but is as per- 
fect and permanent. Grradually the Howadji perceives the 
harmony of the epical, primitive, and grand character of the 
landscape, and the austere simplicity of the Egyptian art. 
Fresh from the galleries of Europe, it is not without awe 
that he glides far behind our known beginnings of civiliza- 
tion, and standing among its primeval forms, realizes the 
relation of nature and art. 



62 NILE NOTES. 



There is no record of any thing, like lyrical poetry in the 
history of the elder Egyptians. Their theology was the 
somber substance of their life. This fact of history the 
Howadji sees before he reads. 

Nature is only epical here. !.She has no little lyrics of 
green groves, and blooming woods, and sequestered lanes — 
no lonely pastoral landscape. But from every point the 
Egyptian could behold the desert heights, and the river, 
and the sky. This grand and solemn Nature has imposed 
upon the art of the land, the law of its own being and 
beauty. Out of the landscapie, too, springs the mystery 
of Egyptian character, and the character of its art. For 
silence is the spirit of these sand mountains, and of this 
sublime sweep of luminous sky— and silence is the mother 
of mystery. Primitive man so surrounded, can then do 
nothing but what is simple and grand. The pyramids 
reproduce the impression* and the form of the landscape 
in which they stand. Tke pyramids say, in the Nature 
around them, " Man, his mark." 

Later, he will be changed by a thousand influences, 
but can never escape the mystery that haunts his home, 
and will carve the Sphinx and the strange mystical Mem- 
non. The Sphinx says to the Howadji what Egypt said [ 
to the Egyptian — ^and from the fascination of her face 
streams all the yearning, profound and pathetic power that 
is the soul of the Egyptian day. 

So also from the moment the Arabian highlands ap- 
peared, we had in their lines and in the ever graceful and 
suggestive palms, the grand elements of Egyptian archi- 



THE LANDSCAPE. 63 

tecture. Often in a luminously blue day as the Howadji 
sits reading or musing before the cabin, the stratified sand 
mountain side, with a stately arcade of palms on the 
smooth green below, floats upon his eye through the serene 
sky as the ideal of that mighty Temple which Egyptian 
architecture struggles to realize — and he feels that he be- 
holds the seed that flowered 9,t last in the Parthenon and 
all Greek architecture. 

The beginnings seem to have been, the sculpture of 
the hills into their own forms, — vast regular chambers cut 
in the rock or earth, vaulted like the sky that hung over 
the hills, and like that, starred with gold in a blue space. 

From these came the erection of separate buildings — 
but always of the same grand and solemn character. In 
them the majesty of the mountain is repeated. Man cons 
the lesson which Nature has taught him. 

Exquisite details follow. The fine flower-like forms 
and foliage that have arrested the quick sensitive eye of 
artistic genius, appear presently as ornaments of his work. 
Man as the master, and the symbol of power, stands calm 
with folded hands in the Osiride columns. Twisted water 
reeds and palms, whose flowing crests are natural capitals, 
Rre added. Then the lotus and acanthus are wreathed 
around the columns, and so the most delicate detail of the 
Egyptian landscape re-appeared in its art. 

But Egyptian art never loses this character of solemn 
sublimity. It is not simply infancy, it was the law of its 
life. The art of Egypt never offered to emancipate itself 
from this character,-— it changed only when strangers 
came. 



64 NILE NOTES, 



Greece fulfilled Egypt. To the austere grandeur of 
simple natural forms, Greek art succeeded as the flower 
to foliage. The essential strength is retained, but an 
aerial grace and elegance, an exquisite elaboration fol- 
lowed ; as Eve followed Adam. For G-recian temples 
have a fine feminineness of character when measured with 
the Egyptian. That hushed harmony of graces— even the 
snow-sparkliiig marble, and the general impression,^ have 
this difference. 

Such hints are simple and obvious-^and there is no 
fairer or more frequent flower upon these charmed shores, 
than the revelations they make of the simple naturalness 
of primitive art. 



VIIL 

Our angels of annunciation, this Christmas eve, were 
the crews of the boats at Benisojih, the first important 
town upon the river. They blew pipes, not unlike those 
of the PifFerari in Rome, who come from the Abruzzi at 
the annunciation, and play before the Madonna shrines 
until her son is born. The evening was not too cool for 
us to smoke our chibouques on the upper deck. There in 
the gray moonlight too, Aboo Seyd was turned to Mecca, 
and genuflexing and ground-kissing to a degree that proved 
his hopeless sinfulness. 

Courteous reader, that Christmas eve, for the first time 
the Howadji went to bed in Levinge's bag. It is a net, 
warranted to keep mosquitoes out, and the occupant in, 
and much recommended by those who have been persuaded 
to buy, and those who have them to sell. I struggled into 
mine, and was comfortable. But the Pacha of two shirt 
tails was in a trying situation. For this perplexing prob- 
lem presented itself — the candle being extinguished to get 
in, or being in, to blow out the candle. " ^ Peace on earth' 
there may be," said the Pacha, holding with one hand the 



4 



66 NILE NOTES. 



candlestick, and with the other the chimney of the bag, 
*' but there is none upon the water," and he stood irresolute, 
until, placing the candlestick upon the floor, and strug- 
gling into the bag, as into an unwilling shirt, the hand was 
protruded — seized the candlestick, and Grenius had cut the 
Gordian knot of Doubt. 

A calm Christmas dawned. It was a day to dream 
of the rose-radiance that trembles over the Mountains of 
the Moon : a day to read Werne's White Nile Journal, with 
its hourly record of tropical life among the simple races of 
the Equator, and enchanting stories of acres of lotus bloom 
in Ethiopia. It was not difficult to fancy that we were 
following him, as we slid away from the shore and saw 
the half-naked people, the mud huts, and every sign of a 
race forever young. 

We sprang ashore for a ramble, and the Pacha took his 
gun for a little bird-murder. Climbing the bank from the 
water we emerged upon the level plain covered with an 
endless mesh of flowering lupin. The palm-grove beck- 
oned friendlily with its pleasant branches, through which 
the breath of the warm morning was whispering sweet 
secrets. I heard them. Fine Ear had not delicater senses 
than the Howadji may have in Egypt. I knew that the 
calm Christmas morning was toying with the subtle- 
winged Summer, under those palms — ^the Summer that 
had fled before me from Switzerland over the Italian vin- 
tage. Over my head was the dreamy murmurousness of 
summer insects swarming in the warm air. The grain 
was green, and the weeds were flowering at my feet. The 



TRACKING. 67 



repose of August weather brooded in the radiant sky. 
Whoso would follow the Summer will find her lingering 
and loitering under the palm-groves of the Nile, when she 
is only a remembrance and a hope upon the vineyards of 
the Rhine, and the gardens of the Hudson. 

Aboo Seyd followed us, and we suddenly encountered 
a brace of unknown Howadji. They proved to be French- 
men, and had each a gun. Why is a Frenchman so un- 
sphered, out of Paris ? They inquired for their boat with 
a tricolor, which we had not seen, and told us that there 
were wild boars in the palm-groves. Then they stalked 
away among the coarse, high, hilfeh grass, with both gun- 
barrels cocked. Presently the charge of one of them came 
rustling around our legs, through the grass. We hailed, 
and informed the hunters that we were pervious to shot. 
They protested and demanded many thousand pardons, 
then discovered their boat and embarked to breakfast, to 
recount over their Bordeaux the morning hunt of san- 
gliers and Anglais^ for one of which, they probably mis- 
took us. 

We returned too, and eat pomegranates, but went ashore 
again, for this was a tracking day — a day when there is 
no wind, but the boat is drawn a few miles by the crew. 
There was a village near us under the palms, and the vil- 
lage smoke, aerialized into delicate blue haze, made with 
the sunset a glowing atmosphere of gold and blue, in 
which a distant palm-grove stood like a dream of Faery. 
Querulous dogs were barking in the vicinity of the mud 
city, for it deserved that name, a chaos of mud huts and 



68 NILE NOTES. 



inclosures, built apparently at random, and full of an in- 
credible squalor, too animal to be sad. The agile Grauls 
were plunging across the plain^ scrambling up little hil- 
locks with their cocked muskets, causing us rueful reflec- 
tions upon the frailty of human legs. Pop-pop, went the 
desperadoes of hunters at the tame pigeons on the palms. 
We wended through the fields of sprouting beans. A few 
women and children lingered still, others were driving 
donkeys and buffaloes homeward — for these hard clay 
hovels were homes too. 

I foresee that the Egyptian sunsets will shine much, 
too much, along these pages. But they are so beautiful, 
and every sunset is so new, that the Howadji must claim 
the law of lovers, and perpetually praise the old beauty for- 
ever young. 

This evening the sun swept suddenly into the west, 
drawing the mists in a whirlpool after him. The vortex 
of luminous vapor gradually diffused itself over the whole 
sky, and the Ibis floated in a mist of gold, its slim yards 
and masts sculptured like Claude's vessels in his sunsets. 
It paled then, gradually, and a golden gloom began the 
night. 

We emerged from the palms, on whose bending boughs 
doves sat and swung, and saw the gloom gradually gray- 
ing over the genial Nile valley. As we neared the Ibis we 
met our third Mohammad, a smooth Nubian of the crew, 
and Seyd, the one-eyed first officer, whom the Commander 
had sent to search for us. They carried staves like 
beadles or like Roman consuls, for they were to see that we 



TRACKING. 69 



" took no detriment" — " for the dogs and the impudent 
people," said G-olden-sleeve, with bodeful head-shakings. 

Thou timorous Commander ! Hath not the Pacha a 
one-barreled gun and tales innumerable ? He said that 
Nero had passed the mud city only the night before. 
But did the moonlight show him what we saw — two Ibis 
perched, snowy white, upon the back of a buffalo ? 

Then, for the fii'st time in their lives, the Howadji sat 
quietly smoking in the open air upon Christmas evening : 
but hunted no slipper, nor was misletoe hung in the cabin. 



IX. 

The wind rose oheerly, the tricolor fluttered and dropped 
behind, and leaving all rivals, the eager Ibis ran wing and 
wing before the breeze. 

The bold mountains did not cease to bully. Sometimes 
they receded a little, leaving spaces of level sand, as if the 
impatient desert behind had in some spots pressed over and 
beyond them ; but they drew out again quite to the stream, 
and rose sheerly in steep, caverned cliffs from the water, 
housing wild fowl innumerable, that shrieked and cried 
like birds of prey before the mighty legions. 

Over these mountain shoulders, the winds not only 
sing, but bloated into storms and sudden tempests, they 
spring upon the leaning lateen sails that fly with eagerly 
pointing yards- beneath, as if to revenge themselves upon 
the river, in the destruction of -what it bears. Under the 
Aboofeyda and the Gebel Shekh Hereedee, and the Gre- 
bel Tookh, and wherever else the mountains pile their 
frowning fronts in precipices along the shore, are the dan- 
gers of Nile navigation. 

A tranquil twilight breath wafted us beneath the first. 



FLYING. 11 



and another sunset breeze ran us dashingly toward the 
Shekh Hereedee. But just when the evening was dark- 
est, a sudden gust sprang upon us from the mountain. 
It shook the fleet bold Ibis into trembling, but she suc- 
ceeded in furling her larger wing, and struggling through 
she fled fast and forward in the dark, until under Orion 
in the zenith, and his silent society, she drew calmly to the 
shore, and dreamed all night of the serpent of Shekh Heree- 
dee, who cured all woes but those of his own making. 

Neither was the Grebel Tookh our friend. The moun- 
tainous regions are always gusty, and the Ibis had been 
squall-struck several times, but ran at last free and fair 
before the wind, between shores serene, on which we could 
hear the call of women to each other, and not seeing their 
faces, could fancy their beauty at will, and their worthi- 
ness to be nymphs of the Nile. 

"We were still slipping swiftly along under the foresail, 
and the minarets of. •Grirgeh glittered on the southern 
horizon. >^ 

a Why not the .maihsail," cried the Pacha, " in this 
lulHng wind ?" 

The Ibis shook out her great wing, and stood across, 
bending with the river, straight toward the Grebel Tookh. 
She plowed the water into flashing foam-furrows as we 
swept on. The very landscape was sparkling and spirited 
for that exciting speed. The half human figures upon the 
shore paused to watch us as we passed. But in the dark 
gulf under the mountain, where, on the steep strip of. 
shore, the Nile had flung down to its foe a gauntlet of 



"^2 NILE NOTES 



green, the gale that lives in Arab tradition along those 
heights, like an awful Afreet, plunged suddenly upon us, 
and for a few moments the proud Ibis strained and quiv- 
ered in its grasp. 

The dark waves dashed foam-tipped against her side, 
and seethed with the swell of a small sea, as the Ibis 
spurned them and flew on. Behind, one solitary C angle 
was struggling with a loosely flapping sail, through a nar- 
row channel, and before us was the point, round which, 
once made, we should fly before the wind. It was clear 
that we had too much canvas for the pass. The crew 
squatted imbecile, wrapped in their blankets, and stared 
in stupid amazement at the clifl' and the river. The an- 
cient mariner, half crouching over the tiller, and show- 
ing his two surviving teeth to the gale, fastened his eye 
upon the boat and the river, while the wild wind danced 
about his drapery, fluttering all his rags, and howling with 
delight as it forced him to strain at his tiller, or with rage 
as it feared his mastery. 

I did not observe that the Muslim were any more 
fatalists than the merest Christians. Mere Christians would 
have helped themselves a little, doubtless, and so would 
the Muslim, if they had known how to do it. Their res- 
ignation was not religion, but stupidity. The golden- 
sleeved Commander was evidently averse to a sloping deck, 
at least to slopes of so aggravated an angle ; and the crew 
were clearly wondering how infidels could rate their lives 
so justly as the Howadji didj in suggesting the mainsail 
at the very feet of the inexorable Grebel Tookh. 



FLY IN" a V3 



Twice the squall struck the Ibis, and twice pausing 
and shivering a moment, she stretched her wings again, 
and fled foamingly mad before it. Then she rounded the 
point, and passing a country boat fully laden with men 
and produce, lying to under a bank, drove on to Grirgeh. 
The baffled gale retreated to its mountain cavern to lie in 
awful ambush for Nero, and the blue pennant, whom we 
had passed already — yes, Osiris ! possibly to hunt the 
hunting Messieurs, nor to let them off for their legs alone. 
Then the Ibis furled neatly and handsomely her wild 
wings before the minarets of Grirgeh. 

D 



^ X. 

As we drift along, and the day paints its placid picture 
upon the eye, each sail shining in the distance, and fading 
beyond the palm-groved points, recalls our fellowrmari- 
ners. You may embark on the same day that others em- 
bark from Boulak, and be two months upon the Nile, yet 
never meet or only so rarely, as to make parting, sorrow. 
Yet as the charm of new impressions and thoughts is 
doubled by reflection in a friend's mind, you scan very 
curiously upon your arrival in Cairo, the groups who are 
to form the society of the River. Usually, however, you 
will come with one friend, nor care much for many others. 
Once in Egypt, you are so far removed from things familiar, 
that you wish to unsphere yourself entirely, to lose all 
trace of your own nationality, and to separate yourself 
from the past. In those dim, beautiful bazaars of Cairo, 
where all the wares of the most inventive imagination 
should be, you dream vaguely that some austere astrol- 
oger sitting cross-legged before his odorous crucibles, and 
breathing contemplative smoke, must needs be Icarian 
progeny, and can whisper the secret of those wings of the 



VERDE GIOVANE. '75 

morning which shall bear you to the uttermost parts of 
the earth. 

All things seem possible when you actually see the 
pyramids and palms. Persia is then very probable, — and 
you are willing to propose the Granges as your next river 
voyage. Yet the first Cairo eve, as the Howadji sat in 
Shepherd's dining-room, that long large hall opening upon 
the balcony, of whose stability some are suspicious, which 
overhangs the Uzbeekeeyah, — massively foliaged with De- 
cember-blooming acacias, — there as they sat tranquilly 
smoking chibouques, detecting an unwonted tendency in 
the legs to curl, and cross themselves upon the cushions, 
and inwardly congratulating themselves that at length 
they were oriental, a brisk little English officer suddenly 
spoke, and said — " When I was in the East." Heavens I 
the Howadji legs uncurled immediately, and the words 
shoved them deep into the West — " when I was in the 
East!" 

" And where were you then. Major Pendennis?" 

For it was plain to see that it was Major Pendennis — 
wearied of Pall Mall — and recruiting from the fatigues of 
Indian service in a little Western recreation in Syria and 
Egypt. 

" Ah ! my dear sir, it was when I was in Persia," — 
and the worthy Major waxed warm in his tales of Persian 
life, especially of that horsemanship whereof Apollo seems 
to have been the Grod — so graceful, so poetic, so perfect is 
its character. But no listener, listened so lovingly and 
long, as Verde Griovane. I thought him a very young 



1Q NILE NOTES. 



grandson of my elderly friend Bull. Yerde was joyous 
and gay. He had already been to the pyramids, and 
had slept in a tomb, and had his pockets picked as he 
wandered through their disagreeable darkness. He had 
come freshly and fast from England, to see the world, 
omitting Paris and Western Europe on his way, — as he 
embarked at Southampton for Alexandria. Being in Cairo, 
he felt himself abroad. Sternhold and Hopkins were his 
Laureates, for perpetually on all kinds of wings of mighty 
winds he came flying all abroad. He lost a great deal of 
money at billiards to "jolly" fellows whom he afterward 
regaled with cold punch and choice cigars. He wrangled 
wildly with a dragoman of very imperfect English powers, 
and packed his tea for the voyage in brown paper parcels. 
He was perpetually on the point of leaving. At breakfast, 
he would take a loud leave of the "jolly" fellows, and if 
there were ladies in the room, he slung his gun in a very 
abandoned manner over his shoulder, and while he adjusted 
his shot-pouch with careless heroism, as if the enemy were 
in ambush on the stairs, — as who should say, " I'll do their 
business easily enough," he would remark with a mean- 
ing smile, that he should stop a day or tv^o at Esne, 
probably, and then go off humming a song from the 
Favorita, — or an air whose words were well known to the 
jolly fellows, but would scarcely bear female criticism. 

After this departure, he had a pleasant way of reappear- 
ing at the dinner-table, for the pale ale was not yet aboard, 
or the cook was ill, or there had been another explosion 
with the dragoman. Verde Griovane found the Cairene 



VERDE GIO VANE. 11 

evenings '' slow." It was astonishing how much execu- 
tion he accomplished with those words of very moderate 
caliber, "slow," "jolly," and "stunning." The universe 
arranged itself in Yerde Giovane's mind, under those three 
heads. Presently it was easy to predicate his criticisms 
in any department. He had lofty views of travel. Yerde 
Giovane had come forth to see the world, and vainly 
might the world seek to be unseen. He wished to push 
on to Sennaar and Ethiopia. It was very slow to go only 
to the cataracts. Ordinary travel, and places already be- 
held of men, were not for Yerde. But if there were any 
Chinese wall to be scaled, or the English standard were to 
be planted upon any vague and awful Himalayan height, 
or a new oasis were to be revealed in the desert of Sahara, 
here was the heaven- appointed Yerde Griovane, only await- 
ing his pale ale, and determined to dally a little at Esne. 
After subduing the East by travel, he proposed to enter 
the Caucasian Mountains, and serve as a Russian officer. 
These things were pleasant to hear, as to behold at Christ- 
mas those terrible beheadings of giants by Tom Thumb, 
for you enjoyed a sweet sense of security and a conscious- 
ness that no harm was done. They were wild Arabian 
romances, attributable to the inspiration of the climate, in 
the city he found so slow. The Cairenes were listening 
elsewhere to their poets, Yerde Griovane was ours ; and we 
knew very well that he would go quietly up to the first 
cataract, and then returning to Alexandria, would steam 
to Jaffa, and thence donkey placidly to Jerusalem, moan- 
ing in his sleep of Cheapside and St. Paul's. 



78 NILE NOTES. 



. His chum, Grunning, was a brisk little barrister, dried 
up in the Temple like a small tart sapson. In the course 
of acquaintance with him, you stumbled surprised upon 
the remains of geniality and gentle culture, as you would 
upon Grreek relics in G-reenland. He was a victim of 
the Circe, Law, but not entirely unhumanized. Like the 
young king, he was half marble, but not all stony. 
Gunning's laugh was very ludicrous. It had no fun in it 
— no more sweetness than a crow's caw, and it sprang 
upon you suddenly and startling, like the breaking down 
of a cart overloaded with stones. He was very ugly and 
moody, and walked apart muttering to himself, and ner- 
vously grinning ghastly grins, so that Grunning was sus- 
pected of insanity — a suspicion that became certainty 
when he fringed his mouth with stiff black bristles, and 
went up the Nile with Verde Giovane. 

For the little Yerde did say a final farewell at last, 
and left the dining-room gayly and gallantly, as a stage 
bandit disappears down pasteboard rocks to desperate en- 
•5ounters with mugs of beer in the green-room. 



XL 

I KNEW at Cairo, too, another youth, whom I was sure 
was a Verde. I thought him brother of the good Verde 
Giovane, but he denied all relationship, although I am 
convinced he was at least first cousin. Possibly, you 
know not the modesty of the Indian Englishman. 

It was in the same dining-room, and the youth was 
expatiating to Major Pendennis upon his braving the des- 
ert dangers from Suez, of his exploits of heroism, and en- 
durance upon the Nile voyage, which he had already made, 
and was again projecting, and generally of things innu- 
merable, and to lesser men insuperable, undergone or over- 
borne. 

<' And up the Nile, too," said he, " I carried no bed, 
and slept upon the bench ; over the desert I go with one 
camel, and she carries every thing. Why will men travel 
with such retinues, caring for their abominable comfort ;" 
and the young gentleman ordered his nargileh. 

"But, my dear sir," said Major Pendennis, "why 
rough it here upon the Nile ? It is harder to do that than 
to go comfortably. You might as well rough it through 
England. The bottle, if you please." 



80 NILE NOTES. 



*'Why, Major," returned the youth, smiling in his turn, 
and crowding his body into his chair, so that the back of 
his head rested upon the chair-back, *' it is well enough 
for some of you, but we poor East India subalterns! 
Besides, you know, Major, discipline — not only military, 
which is in our way, but moral. For what says the Amer- 
ican poet, who, I doubt not, lives ascetically in some re- 
tired cave : 

" Know how sublime a thing it is 
To suffer and be strong." 

So saying, the young man clapped his hands, and a 
Hindoo boy in his native costume appeared. The youth 
addressed some words to him in an unknown tongue, 
which produced no effect until he pointed to his nargileh, 
and rising at the same time, the slave removed the nar- 
gileh a few steps toward his master, who curled up his 
feet and prepared to suffer and be strong in the sofa 
corner. 

By this time Gralignani and the French news were en- 
tirely uninteresting to me. Who this was ? — this per- 
sonage who modestly styled himself we ''poor East In- 
dia subalterns," and summoned Hindoo servants to turn 
round his nargileh, and hob-nobbed with Major Penden- 
nises, and who suffered and was strong in such pleasant 
ways. 

Major Pendennis shoving his chair a little back, said, 
'' When I was in the East," and compared experience of 
travel with his young friend. 



VERDE PIU GIOVANE. 81 

The Major, truly a gallant gentleman, related the Ro- 
man hardihood of those British officers who advance into 
the heart of Hindostan and penetrate to Persia, reclining 
upon cushioned camels, resting upon piles of Persian 
carpets on elevated frameworks under silken tents, sur- 
rounded by a shining society of servants and retinue, so 
that, to every effective officer, every roaring and rampant 
British Lion of this caliber, go eight or ten attendant 
supernumeraries, who wait upon his nargileh, coffee, sher- 
bet, and pale ale, and care generally for his suffering and 
strength. 

In the dim dining-room, I listened wondering to these 
wild tales of military hardship sung by a soldier-poet. I 
fancied as the periods swelled, that I heard the hoary his- 
torian reciting the sparkling romance of Xerxes' marches 
and the shining advance of Persian arms. But no sooner 
had the Major ceased his story, than '' we poor East India 
subalterns" " took up the wondrous tale." 

The Howadji weltered then in a whirlpool of bril- 
liant confusion. Names of fair fame bubbled up from the 
level tone of his speech, like sudden sun-seeking fountains 
from bloom-matted plains. I heard Bagdad, Damascus, 
Sinai, and farther and fairer, the Arabian Grulf, Pearls 
and Circassians. I knew that he was telling of where he 
had been, or might have been, or wished to have been. 
The rich romance reeled on. The fragrant smoke curled 
in heavier clouds. I felt that my experience was like a 
babe unborn, beside that of this mighty man, who knew 
several things, and had brushed the bloom from life with 



82 NILE NOTES 



the idle sweep of his wings, and now tossed us the dull 
rind for our admiring. 

The silence of the room was only more rapt by his 
voice meshing about our attention its folds of fascination, 
when the good Verde Griovane, who sat next to me, and 
who, I fear, was not lending that length of admiring ears, 
of which he was certainly capable, suddenly asked the 
subaltern, " Pray, is the tobacco you are smoking — " 

''Pardon me, sir, this is not tobacco. I am smoking 
coffee leaves." 

Unhappy Gfiovane ! The subaltern looked upon him 
with eyes that said, " Unworthy fellow-countryman, do 
you imagine that men live a brace of years in the H. E. 
I. C.'s service and then smoke tobacco — talk of Arabia 
and pearls, and yet smoke tobacco — of Circassians and 
Lahore, and still smoke tobacco ?" 

In the amazement of that interruption the last whifF 
of the smoke of coffee leaves curled scornfully away over 
Griovane's diminished head. Hands were clapped again, 
servants appeared and replaced with a chibouque the Per- 
sian nargileh of the disciplinarian. 

The mere American Howadji was fascinated with the 
extent and variety of knowledge acquired by the "poor sub- 
alterns." " Never," mused he, in a certain querulous- 
ness of spirit, "never, until we too have an H. E. I. C, can 
we hope to rear such youths as this. Happy country, im- 
perial England, that at home fosters young men like my 
excellent Verde Griovane, and in distant India, a race of 
Verdes, piu Giovane. 



VERDE PIU GIOVANE. 83 

The ''poor subaltern" gradually melted, and at length 
even smiled benignly upon G-iovane, as he suddenly clap- 
ped his hands again and summoned the Hindoo. " Mr. 
Verde, do you smoke paper ?" inquired he. 

" No — why — yes, I should be very happy," replied the 
appalled G-iovane, who told me later, that he considered 
the subaltern a right "jolly" fellow, with a "stunning" 
way with him, in which latter half of praise I was entire- 
ly of Verde's opinion. 

Turning to his servant, the youth said something prob- 
ably in refined Hindostanee, which the boy, speaking only 
a patois, of course could not understand. But " make a 
cigarette" in pure English, resembled his patois to that 
degree that he understood at once, and rolled the cigarette, 
which the youth handed to Giovane with an air of majes- 
tic forgiveness, and then taking a candle, he left the room, 
wishing us good night, as who should say, "My Lords, 
farewell ;" leaving the party still as champagne when the 
gas has bubbled briskly away. 

And yet, with that unmistakable family likeness, he 
could deny that he was of the great Verde family ! 

The mental shock of subsiding into my own thoughts, 
at once, after that evening would have been too much. I 
therefore sought to let myself down by delicate degrees, 
and thinking that I had seized a volume of Hafiz, I step- 
ped upon the balcony to read by moonlight songs of love 
and wine. But I found that I had a natural history by an 
unknown Arabian author. My finger was on this passage — 

" This is a species of the John Bull which now for the 



84 NILE NOTES. 



first time falls under the author's observation. Great is 
Allah and Mohammad his prophet for these new revela- 
tions. I am told," he continues, '' that it is not uncom- 
mon in the mother country. It is there gregarious in its 
habits, and found in flocks in the thickets of Regent and 
Oxford streets, in the paddock of Pall Mall, and usually in 
any large herd of Bulls. 

" Its horns are enormous and threatening, but very 
fle^^ible and harmless. Its ears and tail are of uncommon 
length, but adroitly concealed, and it comes to luxuriant 
perfection in the southern parts of India, and in fact, 
wherever the old herds obtain a footing. 

'' It is very frisky and amusing, and delights to run at 
the spectator with its great horns branching. If he is 
panic-stricken and flies, the Bull pursues him roaring like 
a mighty lion, and with such energy, that the more in- 
genious naturalists suppose, that for the moment, the ani- 
mal really fancies his horns to be hard and pointed, and 
serviceable. If, however, the spectator turns, and boldly 
takes the animal by the horns, they will bend quite 
down — in fact, with a little squeezing will entirely disap- 
pear, and the meek-faced Bull will roar you as gently as 
any sucking dove." 

Nor wonder at such figures in our Nile picture, for 
here are contrasts more profound, lights lighter and shad- 
ows more shaded, than in our better balanced West. Be- 
lieve that you more truly feel the picturesqueness of that 
turban and that garb moving along the shore, because 
Yerde Gfiovane's '' wide-awake" and checked shooting- 



VERDE PIU GIOVANE, 85 

jacket are hard before us. We overhauled them one after- 
noon, and while Yerde Griovane stood in a flat cap and his 
hands in the shooting-jacket's pocket, and told us that Nero 
was just ahead and in sight that morning, Grunning sud- 
denly sprang upon deck, blew off his two barrels, laughed 
hysterically, and glaring full at us, we saw — Dollandl 
that he had succumbed to blue spectacles. 



XII. 

Sherbet op roses in a fountained kiosk of Damascus 
can alone be more utterly oriental to the imagination and 
sense than the first interior view of many-minareted 
Asyoot. 

Breathe here, and reflect that Asyoot is a squalid mud 
town, and perceiving that, and the other too, as you 
must needs do when you are there, believe in magic for 
evermore. 

Under Aboofeyda, from the dragoman of a Dahabieh 
whose Howadji were in the small boat shooting ducks and 
waking all the wild echoes of the cliffs, we had heard of 
Nero just ahead, again, and had left Verde and G-unning 
far behind. As the Ibis flew on with favoring gales, the 
river became more and more winding, and the minarets 
of Asyoot were near across the land, long before the river 
reached the port of the town. Rounding one of the points 
we descried two boats ahead, and we could at length distin- 
guish the Italian tricolor of Nero. His companion bore an 
immensely blue pennant that floated in great bellying folds 
upon the wind, like a huge serpent. Suddenly we came 



ASYOOT. 87 



directly into the wind and threw the men ashore to track 
along a fine bank of acacias. This passed, we saw the 
blue pennant standing across into the reach of the stream 
that stretches straight to Asyoot, and a few moments after 
Nero emerged and strained canvas after, and we, piling 
in our men as soon as possible, drew round, with the wind 
upon our quarter, in hot pursuit. The Ibis had not time 
to win a victory so sure, for Nero's " Kid" frisked by the 
proud pennant, and mooring first to the bank, was quiet as 
the dozing donkeys on the shore, by the time that the Ibis 
touched the bank, and the Howadji landed under a salute 
of one gun from the Kid. Salutatory Nero had an arsenal 
on board, but in that hour, only one gun would go. 

"We were yet a mile or two from the town, which lies 
inland, and we took our way across the fields in which a 
few of the faithful stared sedately upon the green- vailed 
Nera, by whose side rode the Pacha, — Nero and I, and a 
running rabble of many colors, bringing up the rear. 
Herons floated snowily about the green, woodpeckers, 
sparrows, and birds of sunset plumage, darted and fluttered 
over the fields, deluged with the sunlight ; and under a 
gate of Saracenic arch, heralded by the golden-sleeved 
Commander, we entered a cool shady square. 

It was the court of the Pacha's palace, the chief en- 
trance of the town. A low stone bench ran along the 
base of the glaring white walls of the houses upon the 
square, whose windows were screened by blinds, as dark 
as the walls were white, and sitting, and lounging upon 
this bench, groups of figures, — smoking, sipping coffee, ar- 



88 NILE NOTES. 



rayed in gorgeous stuffs — for there in sober sadness was 
the court circle, with the long beards flowing from the im- 
passible dark faces, — gazed with serious sweet Arabian eyes 
upon the Howadji. The ground was a hard smooth clay 
floor, and an arcade of acacias on either hand, walled and 
arched with grateful cool green, the picturesque repose of 
the scene. 

This was a small square, and faded upon the eye, 
forever daguerreotyped on the memory, as we passed over 
a bridge by a Shekh's tomb, a mound of white plaster, 
while under an arch between glaring white walls, stood a 
vailed woman with a high water jar upon her head. 

Threading the town, which is built entirely of the dark 
mud brick, we emerged upon the plain between the houses 
and the mountains. Before us a funeral procession was 
moving to the tombs, and the shrill, melancholy cry of the 
wallers rang fitfully upon the low gusts that wailed more 
grievously, and for a sadder sorrow. "We could not over- 
take the procession, but saw it disappear among the white 
domes of the cemetery, as we began to climb the hills to 
the caves — ^temples, I might say, for their tombs are tem- 
ples who reverence the dead, and these were built with a 
temple grandeur by a race who honored the forms that 
life had honored, beyond the tradition or conception of any 
other people. Great truths, like the Gods, have no country 
or age, and over these ancient Egyptian portals might 
have been carved the saying of the modern German 
Novalis, the body of man is the temple of God. 

These tombs of Stabl Antar, are chambers quarried in 



A S Y T. 89 



the rock. They are not vast, only, but stately. The 
elevation of the entrances and the proportion of the cham- 
bers are full of character. The entrance is not merely a 
way to get in, but attracts the eye by its grand solemn 
loftiness. It harmonizes in sentiment with the figures 
sculptured upon its side — those mysterious high-shoul- 
dered profile figures, whose secret is hidden forever. The 
caves do not reach far into the hills, and there are square 
pits at intervals upon the ground which the donkey boys 
called baths. Haply without authority. 

About these caves are many bones, and a few mummied 
human members, whereover many Nile poets wax melo- 
dious. Eliot Warburton speaks of " the plump arms of 
infancy," — poet Eliot, were they plump when you saw 
them? When your pen slipped smoothly into that sen- 
tence, were you not dreaming of those Egyptian days, 
when doubtless babes were plump, and mothers fair, or 
had you clearly in your eye that shrunken, blackened, 
shapeless and unhuman mummied hand or foot, that your 
one-eyed donkey boy held in his hand ? We must after all 
confess, Eliot, that three-thousand-y eared mummied 
maidens and Verde Griovanes of yesterday are not poetic, 
though upon the Nile. 

There is a broad platform in front of the caves, over- 
looking the valley of the river, the few white tombs of 
shekhs, which dot the solitary places and the town below 
with palms and acacias, and the slim minarets spiring 
silverly and strangely from the undefined dark mass 
of mud houses. The Arabian mountain line, stretched 



90 NILE NOTES, 



straightly and sadly into the southern horizon. Was it 
the day or the place, was it some antique ghost haunting 
its old haunts mournfully, and charming us with its pres- 
ence, that made that broad, luxuriant landscape, with its 
endless dower of spots and objects of fame, so sad? 

Yet, if ghost it were, Verde Griovane laid him — Verde 
and Grunning mounting breathlessly on donkeys, with 
handkerchiefs tied around their wide-awakes, or slouch- 
hats, to " do" the St abl Antar. The donkey -boys chewed 
sugar-cane as they clucked and chirruped us back to the 
city, we, galloping riotously over the plain, but gliding 
slowly through the streets, wondering if every woman were 
not the Princess of China — though which Howadji was the 
Prince of Persia ? The city was simply an illuminated 
chapter of the Arabian Nights. The people were doing just 
what they do there, sitting in the same shops in the same 
dresses, the same inscriptions from the Koran straggled 
about the walls, blurred, defaced, and dim — too much, I 
fear me, as the morals of the Koran straggle about Moham- 
madan brains. There were water-carriers, and fruit-car- 
riers, and bread-carriers. The dark turbaned Copt, the 
wily eyed Turk, the sad-eyed swarthy Egyptian, half cu- 
rious, half careless, smoking, sipping, quarreling, cross- 
legged, parboiled, and indolent. 

Through the narrow bazaar pressed demure donkeys, 
with panniers pregnant of weeds and waste. Camels, 
with calm contemptuous eyes, swung their heads over all 
others, and trod on no naked feet in the throng with their 
own huge, soft, spongy pedals. Little children straddled 



ASYOOT. 91 



the maternal right shoulder, and rode triumphant over 
turbaned men, unabashed by the impending camels. The 
throng was immense, but no sense of rush or hurry heated 
the mind. There was a constant murmur, but that and 
the cool shade were only the sound and the atmosphere of 
the Arabian Nights. 

We stepped into smaller side passages — veins leading 
to the great artery of the bazaar— where, through some 
open door, the still, bright court of a Mosque was re- 
vealed, like the calm face of a virgin. In one niche stood 
a child so handsome, with eyes that were not devoured by 
flies, but round and softly lashed, and very deep and ten- 
der, that I began to feel that, after all, I might be the 
Prince of Persia. 

Yet it was strange how the scene separated itself from 
the actors. They were essential as picturesque objects, 
but slovenly, ugly, and repugnant as fellow-men. The 
East, like the natures which it symbolizes, is a splendid 
excess. There is no measure, no moderation in its rich- 
ness and beauty, or in its squalor and woe. The crocodile 
looks out from a lotus bank, the snake coils in the corner 
of the hareem, and a servant who seems slave from the 
soul out, conducts you to the most dream-like beautiful of 
women. So, as we sauntered through the bazaar of 
Asyoot, we passed the figures of men with no trace of 
manliness, but with faces full of inanity and vice. The 
impression would be profoundly sad, if you could feel their 
humanity. But they are so much below the lowest level 
known to a Western, that they disappear from sympathy. 



92 NILE NOTES. 



Then suddenly passes a face like a vision, and your eyes 
turn, fascinated, to follow, as if they had seen the realized 
perfection of an ideal beauty. 

Oriental masculine beauty is so mild and feminine, 
that the men are like statues of men seen in the most mel- 
lowing and azure atmosphere. The forms of the face have 
a surprising grace and perfection. They are not statues 
of heroes and gods so seen, but the budding beauty of 
Antinous, when he, too, had been in this soft climate, the 
ripening, rounding lip, the arched brow, the heavy droop- 
ing lid, the crushed closed eye, like a bud bursting with 
voluptuous beauty, the low broad brow ; these I remember 
at Asyoot, and remember forever. There is nothing West- 
ern comparable with this. Some Spanish and Italian faces 
suggest it. But they lack the mellow harmony of hue and 
form. Western beauty is intellectual, but intellect has no 
share in this oriental charm. It is in kind the same supe- 
riority which the glowing voluptuousness of color of the 
Venetian school of painting, in which, form is secondary 
and subdued, has over the serenity of the Roman and Tus- 
can schools, which worship form. And, according as a 
man is born with an Eastern or Western nature, will he 
prefer this or that beauty. The truest thing in Byron was 
his great oriental tendency. Men of profoundly passion- \ 
ate natures, instinctively crave the East, or must surround \ 
themselves with an Eastern atmosphere and influence. 
The face of every handsome Oriental is the face of a pas- 
sionate poet in repose, and if you have in yourself the key 
of the mystery, you will perceive poems there that never 



ASYOOT. 93 



have been and never can be written, more than the sad 
sweet strength of the Sphinx's beauty can be described. 
Yet, young yearner for the East, do not fancy that you 
shall always walk glorious among silent poets when you 
touch that land, so golden-shored and houri-peopled in our 
cold imaginations. The handsome of whom I speak, are 
rare as poets are. 

Not only will you find the faces revolting, but the body 
is maimed to a frightful degree. Every second man lacks 
an eye or forefinger, or he is entirely blind. The Egyp- 
tians maimed themselves to escape Mohammad Alee's con- 
scription. Seyd, the first officer of the Ibis, as we have seen, 
had put out his right eye, that he might have no aim, others 
chop off their forefinger, that they may not pull a trigger. 

But more than all disgusting, is the sight of flies feed- 
ing upon the acrid humors that exude from diseased eyes ; 
a misery that multiplies itself. The natives believe ,that 
to wash this away will produce blindness. So it remains, 
and nine tenths of the young children whom you pass, are 
covered, like carrion, with the pertinacious flies, so that 
your own eyes water, though the children seem not to 
heed it. Thus accustomed to that point and that food, 
the fly makes directly for the eye upon every new face 
that he explores, not without vivid visions to the proprie- 
tor, of imported virus, borne by these loathsome bees of 
disease. 

We tasted sweets at a Turkish Gfreybeard's — a fire- 
worshiper, I doubt not, from the intense twinkling red- 
ness of his mole eyes ; then through the slave market — 



94 NILE NOTES, 



empty, for the caravan from Darfom- was not yet arrived ; 
then vi^ent on to the bath and were happy. 

Yet, while we lie turbaned and luxurious upon these 
cushions of the Bagnio, inhaling the pleasant tobacco of 
these lands, fancy for a moment our sensations, when, in 
the otiose parboiled state, we raised vague eyes through 
the reeking warm mist of the Sudarium, and beheld Yerde 
Griovane, gazing semi-scornfully through the door I To 
the otiose parboiled, however, succeeds the saponaceous 
state, in which all merely human emotion slips smoothly 
away. 

The crew returned at midnight to the Ibis, and tum- 
bled their newly-baked bread upon the deck over our 
heads, with a confused shouting and scramble, in the 
midst of which I heard the gurgling water, and knew that 
the famed Lycopolis of old Grreece (why " upstart Grreeks," 
Poet Harriet?) was now set away as a choice bit of mem- 
ory, which no beautiful Damascus, nor storied Cairo, could 
displace, although they might surpass. 

But while the Ibis spreads her wings southward under 
the stars, let us recall and believe the fair tradition that 
makes many-minareted Asyoot the refuge of Mary and 
her child, during the reign of Herod. So is each lovely 
landscape adorned with tales so fair, that the whole land 
is like a solemn-browed Isis, radiantly jeweled. 



XIIL 

The sun is the secret of the East. There seems to be 
no light elsewhere. Italy simply preludes the Orient. Sor- 
rento is near the secret. Sicily is like its hand stretched 
forth over the sea. Their sunsets and dreamy days are 
delicious. You may well read Hafiz in the odorous orange 
darkness of Sorrento, and believe that the lustrous leaves 
languidly moving over you, are palms yielding to the woo- 
ing of Arabian winds. The song of the Syrens, heard by 
you at evening, from these rocks, as you linger along the 
shore, is the same that Ulysses heard, seductive sweet, the 
same that Hadrian must have leaned to hear, as he swept, 
silken-sailed, eastward, as if he had not more than possi- 
ble Eastern conquest in his young Antinous! 

But the secret sweetness of that song is to you what it 
was to Ulysses. Son of the East, it sang to him his na- 
tive language, and he longed to remain. Son of the West, 
tarry not thou for that sweet singing, but push bravely on 
and land where the song is realized. 

The East is a voluptuous reverie of nature. Its 
Egyptian days are perfect. You breathe the sunlight. You 



96 NILE NOTES. 



feel it warm in your lungs and heart. The whole system 
absorbs sunshine, and all your views of life become warmly 
and richly voluptuous. Your day-dreams rise, splendid 
with sun-sparkling aerial architecture. Stories are told, 
songs are sung in your mind, and the scenery of each, and 
the persons, are such as is Damascus seen at morning 
from the Salaheeyah, or Sala-ed-Deen, heroic and grace- 
ful, in the rosy light of chivalric tradition. 

The Egyptian sun does not glare, it shines. The light 
has a creamy quality, soft and mellow, as distinguished 
from the intense whiteness of our American light. The 
forms of our landscape stand sharp and severe in the 
atmosphere, like frost-work. But the Eastern outlines 
are smoothed and softened. The sun is the Mediator, and 
blends beautifully the separate beauties of the landscape. 
It melts the sterner stuff of your nature. The intellect is 
thawed and mellowed. Emotions take the place of thought. 
Sense rises into the sphere of soul. It becomes so exquisite 
and refined, that the old landmarks in the moral world 
begin to totter and dance. They remain nowhere, they 
have no permanent place. Delight and satisfaction, which 
are not sensual, but sensuous, become the law of your 
being ; conscience, lulled all the way from Sicily in the 
soft rocking lap of the Mediterranean, falls quite asleep at 
Cairo, and you take your chance with the other flowers. 
The thoughts that try to come, masque no more as austere 
and sad-browed men, but pass as large-eyed, dusky maid- 
ens, now, with fair folding arms that fascinate you to 
their embrace. Even old thoughts throng to you in this 



THE SUN. 97 



glowing guise. The Howadji feels once more, how the 
Nile flows behind history, and he glides gently into the 
rear of all modern developments, and stands in the pure 
presence of primitive feeling — perceives the naturalness of 
the world's first worship, and is an antique Arabian, a 
devotee of the sun, " as he sails, as he sails." 

For sun-worship is an instinct of the earliest races. 
The sun and stars are the first great friends of man. By 
the one he directs his movements, by the light of the 
other, he gathers the fruit its warmth has ripened. Grrati- 
tude is natural to the youth, and he adores where he 
loves — and of the Grod of the last and wisest faith, the sun 
is still the symbol. 

This sun shines again in the brilliance of the colors the 
Easterns love. The sculptures upon the old tombs and 
temples, are of the most positive colors — red, blue, yellow, 
green and black, were the colors of the old Egyptians — and 
still the instinct is the same in their costume. The poetic 
Howadji would fancy they had studied the beauty of 
rainbows against dark clouds. For golden and gay are 
the turbans wreathed around their dusky brows, and 
figures — the very people of poetry — of which Titian and 
Paul divinely dreamed, but could never paint, sit forever 
in crimson turbans — ^yellow, blue and white robes with 
red slippers crossed under them, languidly breathing smoke 
over Abana and Parphar, rivers of Damascus. And the 
buildings in which they sit, the walls of baths and cafes 
and mosques, are painted in the same gorgeous taste, with 
broad bars of red and blue, and white. Over all fhh 



08 NILE NOTES. 



brilliance streams the intense sunshine, and completes 
what itself suggested. So warm, so glowing, and rich is 
the universal light and atmosphere, that any thing less 
than this in architecture would be unnatural. Strange 
and imperfect as it is, you feel the heart of nature throb- 
bing all through Eastern art. Art there follows the 
plainest hints of nature in costume and architecture now, 
as in the antique architecture. The fault of oriental art 
springs from the very excess, which is the universal law 
of Eastern life. It is the apparent attempt to say more 
than is say able. In the infinite and exquisite elaborations 
of Arabian architecture, there is the evident effort to rea- 
lize all the subtle and strange whims of a luxuriously 
inspired imagination ; and hence results an art that lacks 
large features and character, like the work of a man who 
loves the details of his dreams. 

The child's faith that the East lies nearer the rising 
sun is absurd until you are there. Then you feel that it 
was his first born and inherits the elder share of his love 
and influence. Wherever your eye falls it sees the sun 
and the sun's suggestion. Egypt lies hard against its 
heart. But the sun is like other fathers, and his eldest is 
spoiled. 

As you sweep sun-tranced up the river, the strongest, 
most distinct desire of being an artist, is born of silence and 
the sun. So saturated are you with light and color, that 
they would seem to flow unaided from the brush. But not 
so readily, importunate reader, from the pen. Words are 
worsted by the East. Chiaro ^scuro will not give it. A 



I 



THE SUN. 90 



man must be very cunning to persuade his pen to reveal 
those secrets. But, an artist, I would tarry and worship a 
while in the temples of Italy, then hurry across the sea 
into the presence of the power there adored. There I 
should find that Claude was truly a consecrated priest. 
For this silence and sun breathe beauty along his canvas. 
His pictures are more than Italian, more than the real sun- 
set from the Pinoio, for they are ideal Italy which bends over 
the Nile and fulfills the South. The cluster of boats with 
gay streamers at Luxor, and the turbaned groups under 
the temple columns on the shore, do justify those sunset 
dreams of Claude Lorraine, that stately architecture upon 
the sea. 

I was lost in a sun-dream one afternoon, wondering if, 
Saturn-like, the sun would not one day utterly consume 
his child, when I heard the Commander exclaim, '' El Kar- 
nak !" much as Columbus might have heard " land" from 
his mast-head. 

" There," said the Commander ; and I could scarcely 
believe such a confirmation of my dreams of palm archi- 
tecture, as my eye followed the pointing of his finger to a 
dim, distant point. 

<^ Those?" said! 

"Those," said he. 

I looked again with the glass and beheld, solitary 
and stately upon the distant shore, a company of most un- 
doubted trees ! The Pacha was smiling at my side, and 
declaring that he saw some very fine palms. The Com- 
mander looked again, confessed his mistake, and in exten- 



100 NILE NOTES 



nation, I remarked that he was not golden-sleeved. And, 
after all, what was Ala-ed-deen, if Mr. Lane will spell it 
so, without his lamp ? 

A few moments after, a small boat drew up to us and 
an Emerald Howadji stepped on board. He had left 
Thebes at two o'clock, which sounded strangely to me 
when he said it, for I fancied Thebes already to have done 
with time, and become the property of eternity. He 
cofFeed and smoked, and would leave a duck for dinner, 
gave us all the last news from Thebes, then shook hands 
and went over the side of the Ibis, and out of our knowl- 
edge forever. 

Bon voyage, Emerald Howadji, and as he pulled rapidly 
away with the flowing stream toward his descending Da- 
habieh, he fired at a heron that was streaming whitely over 
him across the stream, a parting salute, possibly, and the 
dead heron streamed whitely after him upon the river. 



XIV. 

The warm vaporous evening gathered, and we moored 
in a broad, beautiful bay of the river. Far inland over 
the shore, the mountain lines differently dark, waved 
away into the night. There were no masts upon the river 
but our own, and only one neighboring Sakia moaned to 
the twilight. G-roups of turbaned figures crouched upon 
the bank. They looked as immovable forms of the land- 
scape as the trees. Molded of mystery, they sat like 
spirits of the dead land personified. In the south, the Li- 
byan mountains came to the river, vague and dim, 
stealthily approaching, like the shy monsters of the desert. 
The eye could not escape the fascination of those fading 
forms, for those mountains overhung Thebes. 

Moored under the palm-trees in the gray beginnings 
of the evening, by the sad mud huts and the squalid Fel- 
lah, and within the spell of the sighing Sakia, I remem- 
bered Thebes and felt an outcast of time. 

A world died before our history was born. The pomp 
and splendor had passed along — the sounds that were the 
words of a great life had swept forward into silence, and I 



102 NILE NOTES. 



lingered in the wake of splendor, like a drowning child be- 
hind a ship, feeling it fade away. I remembered the West 
too, and its budding life, its future, an unrolled heaven of 
new constellations. But it was only a dream dizzying the 
brain, as a man, thirst-stricken, dreams of flowing waters. 
Here for the first time, probably the only time of a life, I felt 
the grandeur and reality of the past preponderate over all 
time. It was the success of Egypt and the East. A fading, 
visionary triumph, as of a dumb slave who wins for a single 
night the preference of her master. 

But in that mountain shadow sat Memnon, darling of 
the dawn, drawing reverence backward to the morning of 
Time. I felt the presence of his land and age, sitting 
solemn, saddening but successful, in the hush of my mind, 
as he sat, marvelous, but melodious no longer, rapt in the 
twilight repose. It was not a permanent feeling. The 
ever young stars looked out, and smiled away antiquity 
as a vapor. They who have visions of the dead floating 
fair in their old beauty and power, do not see them so 
always, probably never again. They repair like all men 
to their tombs, and dream vaguely of the departed. But 
those tombs are temples to them, forever after. 



XV. 

€^i CrntnhiU. 

" Where naked boys, bridling tame water snakes, 
Or charioteering ghastly alligators, 
Had left on the sweet waters mighty wakes 
Of those huge forms " 

Day and night the Ibis did not rest, except when the 
wind fell, and her wings fell with it. She passed Den- 
dereh — Thebes — Luxor. A light breeze wafted her along, 
and those sites of fame grew fair and faded, like pictures 
on the air. The upward Nile voyage is a Barmecide feast. 
You do not pause, except at Asyoot for the crew to bake 
bread, and at Esne, dear to Verde G-iovane — so you enjoy 
the great fames and places by name only ; as Shacabac, 
the Barber's sixth brother, delighted in the sweet bread, 
and the chicken stuffed with pistachio, and the golden 
cups of wine, although they did not appear until he had 
rehearsed his emotions. So finally, you, having partaken 
the Barmecide feast of the ascent, and passed Memphis — 
Abydos — Dendereh — Edfoo, and Kalabsheh, clap your 
hands at Aboo Simbel, and returning — taste the reality of 
Egypt. 

But we were to stop at Esne, for another bread-baking 



104 NILE NOTES. 



for the crew. There was an unwonted display of fine 
raiment as the afternoon waned — coarse hempen blankets 
gave place to blue cotton kaftans — the same that the 
female Bull insisted upon calling Nightgowns. Under 
these, the white vest, with the row of close set buttons, 
^Yas not unhandsome. But when the ample turban went 
round the head — how great was that glory ! With horror 
I beheld Seyd contemplating his slippers, and thence knew 
that Esne was a place of especial importance. 

Strange is the magic of a turban. Eastern garments 
are always graceful, and truly the turban is the crown of 
grace, and honored as the protector of the human head 
should be. There are fashions and colors, in turbans. 
The Turkish is heavy and round— the Syrian broad and 
flat, roll outside roll of rich Cashmere. A special chair' is 
consecrated to the repose of the turban — and losing the 
substance in the form, when an irreverent donkey threw a 
Shekh of dignity into the dirt, and among the camel legs 
of a bazaar, causing him to shed his turban in tumbling, 
the reverent crowd eagerly pursued the turban, and rescu- 
ing it, bore it with care in their hands, shouting " lift up 
the crown of El Islam"— while the poor neglected Shekh 
angrily cried from the dirt, ' ' lift up the Shekh of El Islam." 
The lords of the land, and the luxurious, wreathe around 
their heads Cashmere shawls of texture so delicate, that 
they may be drawn through a thin signet ring, yet they 
are as full, and rich upon the head, as the forms of sun- 
set clouds whose brilliance they emulate. 

This day before Esne, Abdallah, our Samsonian Ab- 



THE CROCODILE. 105 

dallah, sat glorious in the sunset in an incredible turban. 
He was not used to wear one, content on ordinary days 
with a cap that had been white. At first, as if to break 
his head gently into the unaccustomed luxury, I saw him 
sitting upon the boatside very solemnly — his brows cinc- 
tured with what seemed to be a mighty length of dish- 
clout. I fancied that having assisted at the washing of 
the dishes, he had wreathed his brows triumphantly with 
the clouts, as Indian warriors girdle themselves with scalps. 
But presently stationing the weasen-faced crew's cook 
near the mainmast, with one end of a portentously long 
white robe of cotton, he posted himself with the other end 
by the foremast, and then gradually drew the boy toward 
him, as he turned his head like a crank, and so wound 
himself up with glory. Afterward I saw him moving 
with solemn cautiousness, and with his hands ready — as 
if he were the merest trifle top-heavy. Fate paints what 
it will upon the canvas of memory, and I must forever 
see the great, gawky, dog-faithful, abused Samsoniau 
Abdallah, sitting turbaned on the boatside in the sunset. 

''A crocodile," shouted the Commander. And the Ho- 
wadji saw for the first time the pet monster of the Nile. 

He lay upon a sunny sand shore, at our right, a hide- 
ous, horrible monster — a scaled nightmare upon the day. 
He was at least twenty feet long ; but seeing the Ibis with 
fleet wings running, he slipped, slowly soughing, head fore- 
most and leisurely, into the river. 

It was the first blight upon the beauty of the Nile. 
The squalid people were at least picturesque, with their 



106 NILE NOTES. 



costume and water-jars on the shore. But this mole-eyed, 
dragon-tailed abomination, who is often seen by the same 
picturesque people, sluggishly devouring a grandam or 
child on the inaccessible opposite bank, was utterly loath- 
some. Yet he too had his romantic side, the scaly night- 
mare ! so exquisite and perfect are the compensations of 
nature. For if, in the perpetual presence of forms and 
climate so beautiful, and the feeling of a life so intense as 
the Egyptian, there is the constant feeling that the shadow 
must be as deep as the sun is bright, and that weeds must 
foully flaunt where flowers are fairest ; so, when the shadow 
sloped and the weed was seen, they had their own sugges- 
tions of an opposite grace, and in this loathsome spawn of 
slime and mystic waters, it was plain to see the Dragon of 
oriental romance. Had the Howadji followed this feeling 
and penetrated to Buto, they might have seen Sinbad's 
valley. For there Herodotus saw the bones of winged 
snakes, as the Arabians called them. These, without doubt, 
were the bones of serpents, which, being seized by birds 
and borne aloft, seemed to the astonished people to be ser- 
pents flying, and were incorporated into the Arabian ro- 
mances as worthy wonders. 

The Pacha felt very like St. Greorge, and longed to de- 
stroy the dragon ; but having neither sword, spear, nor 
shield — only that trusty one-barreled gun, and no jolly- 
boat (I understood then why all our English friends have 
that boat), he was obliged to see the enemy slinking un- 
touched into the stream, and relieve his mind by rehears- 
ing to me the true method of ending dragons — opportunity 



THE CROCODILE. 107 

and means volentibus. You do not see the crocodile with- 
out a sense of neighborhood to the old Egyptians, for they 
are the only live relics of that dead time, and Ramses the 
Grreat saw them sprawled on the sunny sand as Howadji 
the Little sees them to-day. 

The crocodile was not universally honored. In Lower 
Egypt was it especially sacred, and it was buried with 
dead kings in the labyrinth — ^too sacred in death even for 
Herodotus to see — and doubtless quite as much to our ad- 
vantage unseen by him, for had he been admitted to the 
tombs, our reverent and reverend father would probably 
have " preferred" to say nothing about them. 

In some regions, however, there were regular crocodile 
hunts, and the prey was eaten — a proceeding necessarily 
so disgusting to the devotees of the dragon, that they were 
obliged to declare war against the impious, and endeavor 
to inhibit absolutely the consumption of crocodile chops. 
They did not regard Dragon himself as a G-od, but as 
sacred to the Grod Savak, who was crocodile-headed, and a 
deified form of the sun. 

For, in the city of crocodiles, founded gratefully by 
King Menas, whom a crocodile ferried over the lake Mcenis 
upon his back, when the disloyal hunting-hounds drove 
royalty into the water, was a crocodile so sacred, that it 
was kept separately in an especial lake, and suffered the 
touching of the priests, with a probable view to touching 
them effectually on some apt occasion. This was the croc- 
odile Sachus, says Sir Gardner, quoting Strabo, and Stra- 
bo's host, a man of mark — " one of our most distinguished 



108 NILE NOTES. 



citizens" in the city of crocodiles — showed him and his 
friends the sacred curiosities, conducting them to the brink 
of the lake, on whose bank the animal was extended. 
While some of the priests opened its mouth, one put in the 
cake, and then the meat, after which the wine was poured 
in. The crocodile then dived and lounged to the other side 
of the lake for a similar lunch, offered by another stranger. 
It has no tongue, says Plutarch, speaking through Sir Gard- 
iner, and is therefore regarded as an image of the Deity 
itself — ^" the divine reason needing not speech, but going 
through still and silent paths, while it administers the 
world with justice." 

Who shall say that the Egyptians of old were not 
poets ? The ears of crocodiles were decked with ear-rings, 
and the fore feet with bracelets. They loved life too well, 
those elder brethren of ours, to suffer any refuse in their 
world. As with children, every thing was excellent and 
dear. If they hated, they hated with Johnsonian vigor, 
and which of the Persian poets is it who says that hate is 
only love inverted ? Nor revile their animal worship, since 
they did not make all Dragons Grods, but had always some 
sentiment of gratitude and reverence in the feeling which 
consecrated any animal. There were but four animals uni- 
versally sacred — ^the Ibis, Hawk, Cynocephalus and Apis. 

Animal worship was only a more extended and less po- 
etic Manicheism. Simple shepherds loved the stars and 
worshiped them. But shepherds lose their simplicity in 
towns, and their poetic worship goes out through prose to a 
machinery of forms. The distance from the Arabian wor- 



THE CROCODILE. 109 

ship of stars to the mystic theology of Egypt, is no greater 
than from the Syrian simplicity of Jesus Christ to the 
dusky dogmas of Eome or Greneva. 

But what right have our pages to such names as Apis 
and Cynocephalus ? The symmetry, not the significance 
of hieroglyphs,. is the shrine of our worship. Feebly flies 
the Ibis while the sun sets in a palm-grove, and long sad 
vapors, dashed with dying light, drift and sweep formlessly 
through the blue, like Ossianic ghosts about a dying hero, 
who wail by waving mournfully their flexile length. The 
Reis beat the tarabuka. Abdallah blew the arghool, a 
reedy pipe that I dreamed might draw Pan himself to the 
shore, or a nymph to float in a barque of moon-pearled 
lotus, across the calm. Aboo Seyd clinked the castanets, 
and the crew sang plaintively, clapping their hands. So 
we slid into Esne, and as the Ibis nestled in the starhght 
to the shore, she shook poor little lithe Congo from her 
wing. He fell with a cry and a heavy plunge upon the 
deck. The Howadji ran forward, but found no bones 
broken, only cuts and bumps, and bruises, which the 
Pacha knew how to treat. The crew shook doleful heads, 
and were sure that it was the work of the evil eye — the 
glance of envy cast upon the Ibis by a neighboring drago- 
man, when he heard that she was only eighteen days from 
Cairo. Congo was brought to the rear and laid upon a 
matress and cushions. All that Pachalic skill could do 
was done, and you, ye Indian youths and maidens, sages 
and hags of the West, sing to the sleeping Congo, the 
Pacha's salvatory successes. 



110 NILE NOTES. 



I saw dimly a mud town, and on the bank under a 
plane-tree a little hut, yclept by the luxurious Orientals, 
cofFee-shop. Thither, being robed with due magnificence, 
the Commander proceeded, and bestowed the blessing of 
the golden-sleeved bournouse upon the undeserving Es- 
nians. 



XVI. 

GrREAT is travel ! Yesterday Memnon, to-day a croco- 
dile, to-morrow dancing-girls — and all sunned by a Jan- 
uary, whose burning brilliance shames our fairest June 
fervors. This comes of going down to the sea in ships, 
and doing business upon the great waters, and Sinbading 
round the world generally. 

Yet there are those who cultivate chimney corners, and 
chuckle that a rolling stone gathers no moss, who fillip their 
fingers at Memnon and the sources of the white Nile, who 
order warm slippers and declare that traveling is a fool's 
paradise. Yes. But, set in the azure air of that paradise 
stands the Parthenon, perfect as Homer. There are the 
Coliseum, the Forum, and the earth-quaking memories of 
Rome. There Memnon sings and the G-ondolier. There 
wave palms, and birds of unimagined plumage float. 
There are the mossy footsteps of history, the sweet sources 
of song, the sacred shrines of religion. 

Objective all, I loiow you will respond, fat friend of 
the warm slippers, and you will take down your Coleridge 
and find, 



112 NILE NOTES. 



" ladj, we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does nature live." 

Yes — again, but I mistrust your poet was abroad when 
he sang these numbers. The melodious mystic could not 
reach the fool's paradise through the graceful Grecian 
gate, or the more congenial Egyptian Pylon — so through 
rainbow airs, opium-pinioned, he overflew the walls, and 
awhile breathed other airs. The lines are only partially 
true. Elia, copying accounts in the India House, could 
not enjoy in the wood upon which he wrote, the charm of 
the Tree which had ^' died into the desk." And though 
nature be the mirror of our moods — we can yet sometimes 
escape ourselves — as we can sometimes forget all laws. 
^' Gro abroad and forget yourself," is good advice. The 
Prodigal was long and ruinously abroad before he came 
to himself And poets celebrate the law unlimited, which 
circumstances constantly limit. You would fancy Thom- 
son an early riser. Yet that placid poet, who rented the 
castle of indolence, and made it the House Beautiful, so 
that all who pass are fain to tarry, used to rise at noon, 
and sauntering into the garden eat fruit from the trees 
with his hands in his pocket, and then and there com- 
posed sonorous apostrophes to the rising sun. 

Traveling is a fool's paradise, to a fool. But to him, 
staying at home is the same thing. A fool is always in 
paradise. But into that delight a wise man can no more 
penetrate, than a soul into a stone. If you are a fool, 
friendly reader of the rolling stone theory, you are in the 
paradise you dread, and hermetically closed in. The great 



GETTITTG ASHORE. 113 

gates clanged awful behind you at your birth. But if 
you are wise, you can never by any chance get in. 
AUons, take your slippers, I shall take passage with the 
fool. 

All this we say being somewhat sleepy, under the 
bank at Esne, on the verge of tumbling in. Grood night ! 
But one word ! You facetious friends in the hot slippers, 
what is our so stable-seeming, moss-amassing Earth doing ? 
Truly what Rip Van Winkle heard the aged men do 
among the mountains — trolling, rolling, rolling forever. 

friends of the Verde family, have you duly meditated 
these things ? 



XVIL 

Frail are the fair of Esne. Yet the beauty of gossa- 
mer webs is not less beautiful, because it is not sheet-iron. 
Let the panoplied in principle pass Esne by. There dwell 
the gossamer-moraled Grhawazee. A strange sect the 
Grhawazee — a race dedicate to pleasure. 

Somewhere in these remote regions lay the Lotus 
islands. Mild-eyed and melancholy were the forms that 
swam those calm waters to the loitering vessel, and 
wooed the Mariners with their heart's own longings sooth- 
lier sung — 

" Here are cool mosses deep 
And through the moss the ivies creep, 
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, 
And from the craggy ledge the Poppy hangs in sleep." 

To those enchanted islands and that summer sea, is 
not this river of unknown source the winding avenue? 
Through its silence, ever silenter — along the peaceful 
waving of its palms — azure-arched and lotus-shored, leads 
it not backward to that dream ? 

Yes — ^the Howadji felt it. The day whispered it at 



FAIR FRAILTY. 115 

noon. The palms at sunset waved it from the shore. 
The stars burning ever brighter with the deepening south, 
breathed it with their greater beauty all night long, " Mild- 
eyed, melancholy" were the men. But along the shores 
of this Labyrinth which we so dreamily thread, are stations 
posted, to give exquisite earnest of our borne. And here 
are maidens, not men, vowed to that fair forgetfulness of 
yesterday and to-morrow which is the golden garland of 
to-day. 

These azure airs, soft and voluptuous, are they not 
those that blew beyond the domain of conscience — remote 
region of which Elia dreamed ? Is not the Bishop of that 
diocese unmitred here? For the nonce I renounce my 
fealty, and air myself beyond those limits ; and when I 
return, if mortal may return from the Lotus islands, and 
from streams enchanted, that good Bishop shall only 
lightly touch me with his crosier for the sake of bright 
Kushuk Arnem, and the still-eyed Xenobi. 

Did you sup at the Barmecide's in Bagdad, with Shac- 
abac and myself, that Arabian night ? Well, the Grhazee- 
yah Kushuk Arnem, a girl of Palestine, claims descent 
from him. Or did you assist at Herodias' dancing before 
the royal Herod ? Well, the Grhazeeyah Kushuk Arnem 
dances as Herodias danced. Or in those Pharaoh days, 
something musty now, did you frequent the court balls ? 
Well, this is the same dancing, and needless was it to have 
lived so long ago, for here you have the same delight in 
Kushuk Arnem. Or seated under olives-trees in stately 
Spain, with Don Quixote de la Mancha, were your eyes 



116 NILE NOTES, 



enamored of the Fandango ? That was well, but January 
is not June in Spain, and in Esne the Howadji saw Kus- 
huk Arnenri, and the gracious Grhazeeyah's dance was the 
model of the Spanish. 

For the Egyptian dancing-girls are of a distinct race, 
and of an unknown antiquity. The Egyptian gipsy s, but 
not unanimously, claim the same Barmecidian descent, 
and the Grhawazee, or dancing-girls, each one of which is 
termed Grhazeeyah, wear divers adornments, like those of 
the gipsys. They speak the language and profess the faith 
of the Egyptians — nay, like Hadji Hamed, the long cook 
of the Ibis, they perform the pilgrimage to Mecca for the 
solace of their own souls and bodies, or those of some ac- 
companying ascetic. The race of Grhawazee is kept dis- 
tinct. They marry among themselves, or some Grhazeeyah> 
weary of those sunny slopes, fuori le mure of conscience, 
wondering haply whither they do slope, retreats into the 
religious retirement of the hareem. When she has made 
a vow of repentance, the respectable husband is not consid- 
ered disgraced by the connection. 

For the profession of the Grhawazee is dancing ed altri 
generi. They are migratory, moving from town to town 
with tents, slaves, and cattle, raising readily their homely 
home, and striking it as speedily. In the large cities, they 
inhabit a distinct quarter of the region especially conse- 
crate to pleasure. In villages, they sojourn upon the out- 
skirts. At all fairs, they are the fairest and most fasci- 
nating. But they mostly affect religious festivals — the 
goiag out to tombs in the desert a few miles from the 



FAIR FRAILTY. 117 



cities. For on the natal days of saints inhabiting those 
tombs, a religious spree takes place upon the spot, and 
scenes are presented to the contemplative eye, not unlike 
those of Methodist camp-meetings. At such times and 
places they are present " by thousands, by millions," cried 
the unmathematical Commander, ecstatic with his theme, 
but again without the golden sleeve. 

In golden sleeves alone, Commander, is dignity and 
wisdom. 

I said it was a sect vowed to pleasure. From earliest 
youth they are educated to their profession. They do not 
marry until they have commenced a public career. Then 
the husband is the grand Vizier and Kapellmeister of his 
wife's court. 

Let the moralizing mind reflect here, that the pursuit 
of pleasure is an hereditary tenet, dear to the husband as 
to the wife, who can not be false, because there is no such 
thing as faithfulness. And let the Moral Reform Society 
carefully avoid judging this frailty on principle, for in 
tribes, traditions of usage become principle, by the vice of 
enlightened lands, where it is a very sorrowful and shame- 
ful thing, bred in deceit and ending in despau*. In Eu- 
rope, society squeezes women into this vortex. Then it is 
a mere pis-aller for existence, and loathsome much more to 
the victims themselves than to others. In America, a fair 
preludes the foul. Seduction smooths the slopes of the 
pit, although once in, society here, as there, seals inexora- 
bly the doom of the fallen. For the G-hazeeyah who turns 
from her ways, there is the equality with other wives, and 



118 NILE NOTES. 



no taunting for the Past. For the woman who once falls 
in England or America, there is no resurrection to sympa- 
thy and regard. The world, being without sin, casts end- 
less paving-stones, until hope, heart, and life are quite 
crushed out. 

Moralizing at Esne ! 

Although the G-hawazee, when they marry out of the 
tribe, do not dishonor their husbands in public estimation, 
they are by no means held honorable while they practice 
their profession. This is for many reasons. But let no 
moral reformer flatter himself upon the moral sense of the 
East. " No," said the Grol den-sleeve, "• I wouldn't trust 
my own mother." The Grhawazee are not honorable, be- 
cause, being, as Mr. Lane says, the most beautiful of 
Egyptian women, they show to the sun, moon, stars, and 
all human eyes, their unvailed faces. Then they receive 
men into their own apartments — let us not desecrate the 
sacred name of hareem. And they dance unvailed in pub- 
lic, and if you may believe the shuddering scandal of the 
saints at Cairo, each of whom has a score of women to 
dance for him alone, they adorn with nude grace the mid- 
night revels of the Cairene rakes. 

Mohammad Alee's mercury of virtue rose in his impo- 
tent age to such a height of heat, that he banished all the 
Canene Grhawazee to Esne, which sounded morally, until 
the curious discovered that Esne was the favorite river 
retreat of the Pacha, and the moment they disappeared 
from Cairo, they were replaced by boys dressed like women, 
who danced as the Grhawazee danced, and imitated their 



FAIR FRAILTY. 119 



costume, and all the womanliness of a woman, growing their 
thair, vailing their faces, kohling their eyelashes, hennaing 
their finger and toe nails. 

And there was also another set of boy-dancers, called 
Grink, into the melancholy mystery of which name the 
discreet and virtuous refrain from prying. The Howadji, 
too, is Herodotean for the nonce, and " thinks it better it 
should not be mentioned." 



t 



XVIII. 

jTuir /ruilttj— (CnntiiiBBt 

And so frailty was all boated up the Nile to Esne. Not 
quite, and even if it had been, Abbas Pacha, grandson of 
Mohammad Alee, and at the request of the old Pacha's 
daughter, has boated it all back again. Abbas Pacha 
heritor of the shreds and patches of the Pharaohs' throne, 
and the Ptolemies and the Cleopatras. He did well to 
honor the Ghawazee by his permission of return, for what 
was the swart queen but a glorious Grhazeeyah? Ask 
Marc Antony and Julius Cesar. Nor, shall Rhodopis be 
forgotten, centuries older than Cleopatra, supposed to be 
the builder of one of the pyramids, and of wide Grecian 
fame. 

Herodotus tells her story. She was a Thracian and 
fellow-servant of Esop. Xanthus the Samian brought her 
to Egypt, and Charaxus, brother of Sappho, ransomed her, 
for which service when Charaxus returned, Sappho griev- 
ously gibed him in an ode. Rhodopis became very rich 
and very famous, and sent gifts to Delphi. "And now," 
says our testy and garrulous old guide, as if to wash his 



PAIR FRAILTY. 121 



hands of her iniquity, '' I have done speaking of Rho- 
dopis." 

Even grandfather Mohammad did not boat all the 
frailty up the Nile. That would have been, if the beauti- 
ful Grhazeeyah had been the sole Egyptian sinner. But 
this especial sin pays a tenth of the whole tax of Egypt, 
and the Ghawazee are but the most graceful groups of 
Magdalens, not at all the crowd. The courtesans who 
went with vailed faces discreetly, who were neither hand- 
some nor of any endowment of grace or charm to draw the 
general eye ; — widows and wives, who, in the absence of 
their lords, mellowed their morals for errant cavaliers ; — the 
dead- weighted, sensual, ungraceful, inexcusable, and dis- 
gusting mass remained, and flourished more luxuriantly. 

The solidest sin always does remain ; — the Houris as 
more aerial are blown away, the sadder sinners cling. Law 
and propriety yearly pour away into perdition a flowing 
surface of addled virtue, vice-stained, and a small portion 
of veritable vice. But the great, old, solid sin, sticks 
steadfastly, like the lump of ambergris in the Sultan's cup, 
flavoring the whole draught. For not even the friend of 
the warm slippers and rolling stone theory, can suppose 
that the Muslim are a continent race, or that Mohammad 
Alee was Simeon Stylites, because he exported the dancing- 
girls. 

Hear what Abu Taib said in the gardens of Shubra. 

Once there was a Pacha, who, after drinking much wine 

all his days, lost his taste, and fell in danger of his life if 

he dranlv of it anv more. And the Pacha ordered all the 

F 



122 NILE NOTES. 



wine in the country to be cast into the river. And the fair 
fountains that flowed sweet wine of exquisite exhilaration 
before the mosques, and upon the public place, were seized 
and utterly dried up. But the loathsome, stagnant tanks, 
and ditches of beastly drunkenness that festered concealed 
behind white walls, were untouched, and flowed poison. 
And the Pacha heard what had been done, and said, it was 
well. And far lands heard of the same thing, and said, 
" Lo ! a great prince, who removes sores from his inheri- 
tance, and casts out vice from his dominions." 

There are English poets who celebrate the pleasant 
position of the Eastern woman, and it is rather the West- 
ern fashion of the moment to fancy them not so very mis- 
erably situated. But the idea of woman disappears entire- 
ly from your mind in the East except as an exquisite and 
fascinating toy. The women suggest houris, perhaps, but 
never angels. Devils, possibly, but never friends. And 
now. Pacha, as we stroll slowly by starlight under the 
palms, by the mud cabins round which the Fellaheen, or 
peasants, sit, and their fierce dogs bark, and see the twin 
tombs of the shekhs gleaming white through the twilight, 
while we ramble toward the bower of Kushuk Arnem and 
the still-eyed Xenobi, tell me truly by the sworded Orion 
above us, if you cherish large faith in the virtue of men, 
who, of a voluptuous climate, born and nursed, shut up 
dozens of the most enticing women in the strict and sa- 
cred seclusion of the hareem, and keep them there without 
knowledge, without ambition — petted girls with the proud 
passions of Southern women, seeing him only of men, jeal- 



FAIR FRAILTY. 123 



ous of each other, jealous of themselves, the slaves of his 
whims, tender or terrible, looking to him for their sole ex- 
citement, and that solely sensual — rarely tasting the bliss 
of becoming a mother, and taught to stimulate in inde- 
scribable v^rays the palling and flagging passions of their 
keeper. 

Individually, I lay no great stress on the objections of 
such gentry to the unvailed dancing of beautiful women, 
or to their pleasurable pursuit of pleasure ; nor do I find 
much morality in it. I am glad to grant the Oriental great 
virtue ; and do not wish to whine at his social and national 
differences from the West. At Alexandria, let the West 
fade from your horizon, and you will sail fascinated for- 
ever. This Howadji holds that the Grhawazee are the true 
philosophers and moralists of the East, and that the ha- 
reem and polygamy in general, are without defense, 
viewed morally. Viewed picturesquely under palms, with 
delicious eyes melting at lattices, they are highly to be 
favored and encouraged by all poets and disciples of Epi- 
curus. 

Which, as you know as well as I, we will not here 
discuss. But, as I am out of breath, toiling up that steep 
sentence of the hareern, while we more leisurely climb the 
last dust heap toward that bower, the sole white wall of 
the village (how Satan loves these dear deceits, as excel- 
lent Dr. Bunyan Cheever would phrase it) soothe me 
soothly with those limpid lines of Mr. Milnes, who holds 
strongly to the high human and refining influence of the 
hareem. Does Young England wish to engraft polygamy 



124 NILE NOTES. 



among the other patriarchal benefits upon stout old Eng- 
land? 

" Thus in the ever-closed hareem, 

As in the open Western home, 
Sheds womanhood her starry gleam, 

Over om: being's busy foam. 
Thi'ough latitudes of varying faith, 

Thus trace we still her mission sure, 
To lighten life, to sweeten death ; 

And all for others to endure." 

Every toad carries a diamond in its head, says Hope 
and the Ideal. But in any known toad was it ever found ? 
retorted the Howadji, cutting adrift his Western morals. 



XIX. 

luslitik %tntm. 

The Howadji entered the bower of the Grhazeeyah. A 
damsel admitted us at the gate, closely vailed, as if 
women's faces were to be seen no more forever. Across a 
clean little court, up stone steps that once were steadier, 
and we emerged upon a small inclosed stone terrace, the 
sky- vaulted anti-chamber of that bower. Through a little 
door that made us stoop to enter, we passed into the 
peculiar retreat of the Grhazeeyah. It was a small, white, 
oblong room, with but one window, opposite the door, and 
that closed. On three sides there were small holes to 
admit light as in dungeons, but too lofty for the eye to 
look through, like the oriel windows of Sacristies. Under 
these openings were small glass vases holding oil, on which 
floated wicks. These were the means of illumination. 

A divan of honor filled the end of the room— on the 
side was another, less honorable, as is usual in all Egyp- 
tian houses — on the floor a carpet, partly covering it. A 
straw matting extended beyond the carpet toward the 
door, and between the matting and the door was a bare 
space of stone floor, whereon to shed the slippers. 



126 NILE NOTES. 



Hadji Hamed, the long cook, had been ill, but hearing 
of music and dancing and Ghawazee, he had turned out 
for the nonce, and accompanied us to the house, not all 
unmindful possibly of the delectations of the Mecca pil- 
grimage. He stood upon the stone terrace afterward, look- 
ing in with huge delight. The solemn, long tomb-pil- 
grim ! The merriest lunges of life were not lost upon him, 
notwithstanding. 

The Howadji seated themselves orientally upon the 
divan of honor. To sit as Westerns sit, is impossible upon 
a divan. There is some mysterious necessity for crossing 
the legs, and this Howadji never sees a tailor now in 
lands civilized, but the dimness of Eastern rooms and 
bazaars, the flowingness of robe, and the coiled splendor 
of the turban, and a world reclining leisurely at ease, rise 
distinct and dear in his mind — -like that Sicilian mirage 
seen on divine days from Naples — but fleet as fair. To 
most men a tailor is the most unsuggestive of mortals. 
To the remembering Howadji he sits a poet. 

The chibouque and nargileh and coffee belong to the 
divan, as the parts of harmony to each other. I seized the 
flowing tube of a brilliant amber-hued nargileh, such as 
Hafiz might have smoked, and prayed Isis that some stray 
Persian might chance along to complete our company. 
The Pacha inhaled at times a more sedate nargileh, at 
times the chibouque of the Commander, who reclined upon 
the divan below. 

A tall Egyptian female, filially related I am sure to a 
gentle giraffe who had been indiscreet with a hippopotamus, 



KUSHUK ARNEM. 127 

moved heavily about, lighting the lamps, and looking as if 
her bright eyes were feeding upon the flame, as the 
giraffes might browse upon lofty autumn leaves. There 
was something awful in this figure. She was the type of 
those tall, angular, Chinese-eyed, semi-smiling, wholly 
homely and bewitched beings who sit in eternal profile in 
the sculptures of the temples. She was mystic, like the 
cow-horned Isis. I gradually feared that she had come 
off the wall of a tomb, probably in Thebes hard by, and 
that our Ghawazee delights would end in a sudden em- 
balming, and laying away in the bowels of the hills with 
a perpetual prospect of her upon the walls. 

Avaunt, Specter ! The Fay approaches, and Kushuk 
Arnem entered her bower. A bud no longer, yet a flower 
not too fully blown. Large laughing eyes, red pulpy 
lips, white teeth, arching nose, generous-featured, lazy, 
carelessly self-possessed, she came dancing in, addressing 
the Howadji in Arabic^words whose honey they would 
not have distilled through interpretation. Be content with 
the aroma of sound, if you can not catch the flavor of 
sense — and flavor can you never have through another 
mouth. Smiling and Pantomime were our talking, and one 
choice Italian word, she knew — buono. Ah ! how much 
was buono that choice evening. Eyes, lips, hair, form, 
dress, every thing that the strangers had or wore, was 
endlessly buono. Dancing, singing, smoking, coffee, — 
buono^ buono^ buonissimo I How much work one word 
will do ! 

The Ghazeeyah entered — not mazed in that azure misl 



128 NILE NOTES. 



of gauze and muslin wherein Cerito floats fascinating 
across the scene, nor in the peacock plumage of sprightly 
Lucille Grrahn, nor yet in that June cloudiness of aery 
apparel which Carlotta affects, nor in that sumptuous 
Spanishness of dark drapery wherein Fanny is most 
Fanny. 

The glory of a butterfly is the starred brilliance of its 
wings. There are who declare that dress is divine, who 
aver that an untoileted woman is not wholly a woman, 
and that you may as well paint a saint without his halo, 
as describe a woman without detailing her dress. There- 
fore, while the coarser sex vails longing eyes, will we tell 
the story of the Ghazeeyah's apparel. 

Yellow morocco slippers hid her feet, rosy and round. 
Over these brooded a bewildering fullness of rainbow silk. 
Turkish trowsers we call them, but they are shintyan in 
Arabic. Like the sleeve of a clergyman's gown, the lower 
end is gathered somewhere, and the fullness gracefully 
overfalls. I say rainbow, although to the Howadji's little 
cognizant eye was the shintyan of more than the seven 
orthodox colors. In the bower of Kushuk, nargileh- clouded, 
coffee-scented, are eyes to be strictly trusted ? 

Yet ^ye must not be entangled in this bewildering bril- 
liance. A satin jacket striped with velvet and of open 
sleeves, wherefrom floated forth a fleecy cloud of under- 
sleeve, rolling adown the rosy arms, as June clouds 
down the western rosiness of the sky, inclosed the bust. 
A shawl twisted of many folds cinctured the waist, con- 
fining the silken shintyan. A golden necklace of charms 



KUSHUK ARNEM. 129 

girdled the throat, and the hair much unctuated, as is the 
custom of the land, was adorned with a pendent fringe of 
black silk, tipped with gold, which hung upon the neck 
behind. 

Let us confess to a dreamy vaporous vail, overspread- 
ing, rather suffusing with color, the upper part of the arms 
and the lower limits of the neck. That rosiness is known 
as tob to the Arabians — a mystery whereof the merely 
masculine mind is not cognizant. Beneath the tob, truth 
allows a beautiful bud-burstiness of bosom. Yet I swear, 
by John Bunyan, nothing so aggravating as the Howadji 
beholds in saloons unnamable nearer the Hudson than 
the Nile. This brilliant cloud, whose spirit was Kushuk 
Arnem, our gay G-hazeeyah, gathered itself upon a divan, 
and she inhaled vigorously a nargileh. A damsel in tob 
and shintyan, exhaling azure clouds of aromatic smoke, 
had not been displeasing to that Persian poet, for whose 
coming I had prayed too late. 

But more welcome than he, came the still-eyed Xenobi. 
She entered timidly like a bird. The Howadji had seen 
doves less gracefully sitting upon palm-boughs in the sun- 
set, than she nestled upon the lower divan. A very dove 
of a Ghazeeyah, a quiet child, the last born of Terpsichore. 
Blow it from Mount Atlas, a modest dancing-girl. She sat 
near this Howadji, and handed him, Haroun Alrashid ! 
the tube of his nargileh. Its serpentine sinuosity flowed 
through her fingers, as if the golden gayety of her costume 
were gliding from her alive. It was an electric chain of 
communication, and never until some Xenobi of a houri 



130 NILE NOTES. 



hands the Howadji the nargileh of Paradise, will the smoke 
of the weed of Shiraz float so lightly, or so sweetly taste. 

Xenobi was a mere bud, of most flexile and graceful 
form — ripe and round as the Spring fruit of the tropics. 
Kushuk had the air of a woman for whom no surprises 
survive. Xenobi saw in every new day a surprise, haply 
in every Howadji a lover. 

She was more richly dressed than Kushuk. There 
were gay gold bands and clasps upon her jacket. Various 
necklaces of stamped gold and metallic charms clustered 
around her neck, and upon her head a bright silken web, 
as if a sun-suffused cloud were lingering there, and dis- 
solving, showered down her neck in a golden rain of pen- 
dants. Then, Venus ! more azure still, that delicious 
gauziness of tob, whereof more than to dream is delirium. 
Wonderful the witchery of a tob ! Nor can the Howadji 
deem a maiden quite just to nature, who glides through 
the world, unshintyaned and untobed. 

Xenobi was perhaps sixteen years old, and a fully de- 
veloped woman. Kushuk Arnem, of some half-dozen Sum- 
mers more. Kushuk was unhennaed. But the younger, 
as younger maidens may, graced herself with the genial 
gifts of nature. Her delicate filbert nails were rosily 
tinted on the tips with henna, and those pedler poets 
meeting her in Paradise would have felt the reason of their 
chant— -" Odors of Paradise, flowers of the henna!" 
But she had no kohl upon the eyelashes, nor like Fatima 
of Damascus, whom the Howadji later saw, were her eye- 
brows shaved and replaced by thick, black arches of kohl. 



I 



i 



KUSHUKARNEM. 131 

Yet fascinating are the almond-eyes of Egyptian women, 
bordered black with the kohl, whose intensity accords with 
the sumptuous passion that mingles moist and languid 
with their light. Eastern eyes are full of moonlight — 
Eastern beauty is a dream of passionate possibility, which 
the Howadji would fain awaken by the same spell with 
which the Prince of faery dissolved the enchanted sleep 
of the princess. Yet kohl and henna are only beautiful 
for the beautiful. In a cofFee-shop at Esne, bold-faced 
among the men, sat a coarse courtesan sipping coffee and 
smoking a nargileh, whose kohled eyebrows and eyelashes 
made her a houri of hell. 

^' There is no joy but calm," I said, as the moments, 
brimmed with beauty, melted in the starlight, and the 
small room became a bower of bloom and a Persian garden 
of delight. We reclined, breathing fragrant fumes, and 
interchanging, through the Grolden-sleeved, airy nothings. 
The Howadji and the Houris had little in common but 
looks. Soulless as Undine, and suddenly risen from a 
laughing life in watery dells of lotus, sat the houris, 
and, like the mariner, sea-driven upon the enchanted isle 
of Prospero, sat the Howadji, unknowing the graceful gos- 
sip of Faery. But there is a faery always folded away in 
our souls, like a bright butterfly chrysalised, and sailing 
eastward, layer after layer of propriety, moderation, defer- 
ence to public opinion, safety of sentiment, and all the 
thick crusts of compromise and convention roll away, and 
bending southward up the Nile, you may feel that faery 
fairly flatter her wings. And if yoi; pause at Esne, she 



132 NILE NOTES 



will fly out, and lead you a will-o'-the-wisp dance across 
all the trim sharp hedges of accustomed proprieties, and 
over the barren flats of social decencies. Dumb is that 
faery, so long has she been secluded, and can not say 
much to her fellows. But she feels and sees and enjoys 
all the more exquisitely and profoundly for her long se- 
questration. 

Presently an old woman came in with a tar, a kind of 
tambourine, and her husband, a grisly old sinner, with a 
rabab, or one-stringed fiddle. Old Hecate was a gone Grha- 
zeeyah — a rose-leaf utterly shriveled away from rosiness. 
No longer a dancer, she made music for dancing. And 
the husband, who played for her in her youth, now played 
with her in her age. Like two old votaries who feel when 
they can no longer see, they devoted all the force of life 
remaining, to the great game of pleasure, whose born 
thralls they were. 

There were two tarabukas and brass castanets, and 
when the old pair were seated upon the carpet near the 
door, they all smote their rude instruments, and a wild 
clang raged through the little chamber. Thereto they 
sang. Strange sounds — such music as the angular, carved 
figures upon the Temples would make, had they been con- 
versing with us— sounds to the ear like their gracelessness 
to the eye. 

This was Egyptian Polyhymnia preluding Terpsichore. 



XX. 

" The wind is fair, 
The boat is in the bay, 
And the fair mermaid Piloi calls away " 

KusHUK Arnem quaffed a goblet of hemp arrack. The 
beaker was passed to the upper divan, and the Howadji, 
sipping, found it to smack of aniseed. It was strong 
enough for the Pharaohs to have imbibed — even for Her- 
od before beholding Herodias, for these dances are the same. 
This dancing is more ancient than Aboo Simbel. In the 
land of the Pharaohs, the Howadji saw the dancing they 
saw, as uncouth as the temples they built. This dancing 
is to the ballet of civilized lands, what the gracelessness 
of Egypt was to the grace of Grreece. Had the angular 
figures of the Temple sculptures preluded with that mu- 
sic, they had certainly followed with this dancing. 

Kushuk Arnem rose and loosened her shawl girdle in 
such wise, that I feared she was about to shed the frivol- 
ity of dress, as Yenus shed the sea-foam, and stood oppo- 
site the divan, holding her brass castanets. Old Hecate 
beat the tar into a thunderous roar. Old husband drew 



134 NILE NOTES. 



sounds from his horrible rabab, sharper than the sting of 
remorse, and Xenobi and the G-irafFe each thrummed a 
tarabuka until I thought the plaster would peel from the 
wall. Kushuk stood motionless, while this din deepened 
around her, the arrack aerializing her feet, the Howadji 
hoped, and not her brain. The sharp surges of sound 
swept around the room, dashing in regular measure against 
her movelessness, until suddenly the whole surface of her 
frame quivered in measure with the music. Her hands 
were raised, clapping the castanets, and she slowly turned 
upon herself, her right leg the pivot, marvelously convuls- 
ing all the muscles of her body. "When she had completed 
the circuit of the spot on which she stood, she advanced 
slowly, all the muscles jerking in time to the music, and 
in solid, substantial spasms. 

It was a curious and wonderful gymnastic. There 
was no graceful dancing— once only there was the move- 
ment of dancing when she advanced, throwing one leg 
before the other as gipsys dance. But the rest was most . 
voluptuous motion — not the lithe wooing of languid pas- \ 
sion, but the soul of passion starting through every sense, y 
and quivering in every limb. It was the very intensity 
of motion, concentrated and constant. The music still 
swelled savagely in maddened monotony of measure. 
Hecate and the old husband, fascinated with the Ghazee- 
yah's fire, threw their hands and arms excitedly about 
their instruments, and an occasional cry of enthusiasm 
and satisfaction burst from their lips. Suddenly stooping, 
still muscularly moving, Kushuk fell upon her knees, and 



TERPSICHORE. 135 



writhed with body, arms and head upon the floor, still in 
measure — still clanking the castanets, and arose in the same 
manner. It was profoundly dramatic. The scenery of 
the dance was like that of a characteristic song. It was a 
lyric of love which words can not tell — profound, orien- 
tal, intense and terrible. Still she retreated, until the 
constantly down-slipping shawl seemed only just clinging 
to her hips, and making the same circuit upon herself, she 
sat down, and after this violent and extravagant exertion 
was marbly cold. 

Then timid but not tremulous, the young Xenobi arose 
bare-footed, and danced the same dance — not with the 
finished skill of Kushuk, but gracefully and well, and 
with her eyes fixed constantly upon the elder. "With the 
same regular throb of the muscles she advanced and re- 
treated, and the Paradise-pavilioned prophet could not 
have felt his heavenly hareem complete, had he sat smok- 
ing and entranced with the Howadji. 

Form so perfect was never yet carved in marble — not 
the Venus is so mellowly molded. Her outline has not 
the voluptuous excess which is not too much — which is 
not perceptible to mere criticism, and is more a feeling 
flushing along the form, than a greater fullness of the form 
itself. The Greek Venus was sea-born, but our Egyptian 
is sun-born. The brown blood of the sun burned along 
her veins — the soul of the sun streamed shaded from her 
eyes. She was still, almost statuesquely still. When she 
danced it was only stillness intensely stirred, and followed 
that of Kushuk as moonlight succeeds sunshine. As she 



136 NILE NOTES 



went on, Kushuk gradually rose, and joining her they 
danced together. The Epicureans of Cairo indeed, the 
very young priests of Venus, assemble the G-hawazee in 
the most secluded Adyta of their dwellings, and there 
eschewing the mystery of the Hintyan, and the gauziness 
of the tob, they behold the unencumbered beauty of these 
beautiful women. At festivals so fair, arrack, raw brandy, 
and ^'depraved human nature," naturally improvise a 
ballet whereupon the curtain here falls. 

Suddenly, as the clarion call awakens the long-slumber- 
ing spirit of the war-horse, old Hecate sprang to her feet, 
and loosening her girdle, seized the castanets, and with 
the pure pride of power advanced upon the floor, and 
danced incredibly. Crouching before like a wasted old 
willow, that merely shakes its drooping leaves to the 
tempest — she now shook her fibers with the vigor of a 
nascent elm, and moved up and down the room with a 
miraculous command of her frame. 

In Venice I had heard a gray Grondolier, dwindled into 
a Ferryman, awakened in a moonlighted midnight, as we 
swept by with singers chanting Tasso, pour his swan- 
song of magnificent memory into the quick ear of night. 

In the Champs Elysees I had heard a rheumy-eyed 
Invalide cry with the sonorous enthusiasm of Austerlitz, 
" Vive Napoleon," as a new Napoleon rode by. 

It was the Indian summer goldening the white winter — 
the Zodiacal light far flashing day into the twilight. And 
here was the same in dead old Egypt — in a Grhazeeyah who 
had brimmed her beaker with the threescore and ten drops 



TERPSICHORE. 137 



of life. Not more strange, and unreal, and impressive in 
their way, the inscrutable remains of Egypt, sand-shrouded 
but undecayed, than in hers this strange spectacle of an 
efficient Coryphee of seventy. 

Old Hecate I thou wast pure pomegranate also, and not 
banana, wonder most wonderful of all — words which must 
remain hieroglyphics upon these pages — and whose expli- 
cation must be sought in Egypt, as they must come hither 
who would realize the freshness of Karnak. 

Slow sweet singing foUoAved. The refrain was plain- 
tive, like those of the boat songs — soothing, after the ex- 
citement of the dancing, as nursery lays to children after 
a tired day. '' Buono," Kushuk Arnem ! last of the Ar- 
nems, for so her name signified. Was it a remembering 
refrain of Palestine, whose daughter you are ? " Taib," 
dove Xenobi ! Fated, shall I say, or favored ? Pledged 
life-long to pleasure ! Who would dare to be ? Who but 
a child so careless would dream that these placid ripples 
of youth will rock you stormless to El Dorado ? 

Allah ! and who cares ? Refill the amber nargileh, 
Xenobi — another fingan of mellow mocha. Yet another 
strain more stirring. Hence, Hecate ! shrivel into invisi- 
bility with the thundering tar, and the old husband with 
his diabolical rabab. Waits not the one-eyed first officer 
below, with a linen lantern, to pilot us to the boat ? And 
the beak of the Ibis points it not to Syene, Nubia, and a 
world unknown? 

Farewell, Kushuk ! Addio, still-eyed dove I Almost thou 
persuadest me to pleasure. Wall-street, Wall-street ! be- 
cause you are virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale ? 



.<rv 



XXI. 

"We departed at dawn. Before a gentle gale the Ibis 
fleetly flew, in the starlight, serenaded by the Sakias. 

These endless sighing Sakias ! There are fifty thou* 
sand of them in Egypt, or were, when Grandfather Mo- 
hammad was. They required a hundred and fifty thou- 
sand oxen to work them. But the murrain swept away 
the cattle, and now the Nile shores are strewn with the 
falling mud walls of Sakias, ruins of the last great Egyp- 
tian reign. Like huge summer insects, they doze upon 
the bank, droning a melancholy, monotonous song. The 
slow, sad sound pervades the land — one calls to another, 
and he sighs to his neighbor, and the Nile is shored with 
sound no less than sand. Their chorus is the swan-song 
of Egypt. For Egypt is effete. The race is more ruined 
than the temples. Nor shall there be a resurrection of an 
exhausted people, until fading roses, buried in the ground, 
take root again, or Memnon calls musically once more, 
down the far glad valley of the Nile. 

The Sakia is the great instrument of irrigation. It is 
a rade contrivance of two perpendicular wheels, turned by 



SAKIAS. 139 



a horizontal cog. The outer wheel is girdled with a string 
of earthen jars, which descend with every revolution into 
the pit open to the river, in which the wheel turns. As 
the jars ascend, they empty themselves into a trough, 
thence conducted away, or directly into a channel of 
earth j and the water flowing into the fields, by little ca- 
nals, invests each separate small square patch. There are 
no fences, and the valley of the Nile is divided into endless 
inclosures by these shallow canals. The surface of the 
country is regularly veined, and the larger channels are 
the arteries fed by the great Sakia heart. Overflowing or 
falling, the Nile is forever nourishing Egypt, and far forth- 
looking from the propylons of temples, you may see the 
land checkered with slight silver streaks — ^tokens of its 
fealty and the Nile's devotion. 

The Sakia is worked by a pair of oxen. Upon the 
tongue of the crank which they turn, sits a boy, drowsing 
and droning, and beating their tail-region all day long. 
Nor is the sad creak of the wheel ever soothed by any 
unctuous matter, which the proprietor appropriates to his 
own proper person, and which would also destroy the 
cherished creak. So sit the boys along the Nile, among 
the cotton, tobacco, corn, beans, or whatever other crop, 
and by beating the tail-region of many oxen, cause the 
melancholy music of the river. It has infinite variety, 
but a mournful monotony of effect. Some Sakias are 
sharp and shrill ; they almost shriek in the tranced still- 
ness. These you may know for the youth — these are the 
gibes of greenness. But sedater creaks follow. A plain- 



140 KILE NOTES, 



tive monotony of moan that is helpless and hopeless. This 
is the general Sakia sigh. It is as if the air simmered into 
sound upon the shore. It is the overtaxed labor of the 
land complaining, a slave's plaining — low and lorn and 
lifeless. Yet as the summer seems not truly summer, un- 
til the locusts w^ind their dozy reeds, so Egypt seems not 
truly Egypt, except when the water-wheels sadden the 
silence. It is the audible weaving of the spell. The still- 
ness were not so still without it, nor the temples so antique, 
nor the whole land so solitary and dea^ 

In books I read that it is the Ranz des Vaches of the 
Fallaheen, and that away from the Nile they sigh for the 
Sakia, as it sighs with them at home. And truly no pic- 
ture of the river would be perfect that had not the water- 
wheels upon the shore. They abound in Nubia, and are 
there taxed heavily — some seventeen of our dollars each 
one. The Howadji wonders how such a tax can be paid, 
and the Nubian live. But if it be not promptly rendered 
the owner is ejected. He may have as much land as he 
can water, as much Arabian sand or Libyan, as he can 
coax the Nile to fructify. And there nature is compas- 
sionate. For out of what seems sheer sand you will see 
springing a deep-green patch of grain. 

In upper Egypt and Nubia the Shadoof is seldom seen. 
That is a man-power Sakia, consisting simply of buckets 
swinging upon a pole, like a well bucket, and dipped into 
the river and emptied above by another into the channel. 
There are always two buckets, and the men stand opposite, 
only girded a little about the loins, or more frequently not 



SAKIAS. 141 



at all, and plunging the bucket rapidly. It is exhausting 
labor, and no man is engaged more than two or three hours 
at a time. If the bank is very high, there are two or more 
ranges of Shadoofs, the lower pouring into the reservoirs of 
the upper. The Shadoofs abound in the sugar-cane region 
about Minyeh. They give a spectral life to the shore. 
The bronze statues moving as by pulleys, and the regular 
swing of the Shadoof. There is no creak, but silently in 
the sun the poles swing and the naked laborers sweat. 

Sakia-spelled the Ibis flew, and awakening one mid- 
night, I heard the murmurous music of distant bells filling 
all the air. As one on Summer Sundays loiters in flowery 
fields suburban, and catches the city chimes hushed and far 
away, so lingered and listened the Howadji along the verge 
of dreaming. Has the ear mirages, mused he, like the 
eye? 

He remembered the day, and it was Sunday — Sunday 
morning across the sea. Still the clanging confusion, 
hushed into melody, rang on. He heard the orthodox sono- 
rousness of St. John's, the sweet solemnity of St. Paul's, then 
the petulant peal of the dissenting bells dashed in. But 
all so sweet and far, until the belfry of the old Brick bel- 
lowed with joy, as if the head of giant Despair were now 
finally broken. Had Nilus wreathed these brows with 
magic lotus ? 

Now, mused the Howadji, haply dreaming still, now 
contrite Grotham, in its Sunday suit of sackcloth and ashes, 
hies humbly forth to repentance and prayer. Perchance 
some maiden tarries that her hair may be fitly folded, that 



142 NILE NOTES 



she may wait upon the Lord en grande tenue. In godly 
Grotham such things have been. Divers of its daughters 
once tarried from the service and sermon that a French 
barber might lay his hand upon their heads, before the 
bishop. Then, like coiffed cherubim, they stole sweetly 
up the church-aisle, well named of grace, if its Grod must 
abide such worship, and were confirmed — in what? de- 
manded the now clearly dreaming Howadji. 

Belfry of old Brick, clang not so proudly ! Haply the 
head of the giant Despair is only cracked, not yet broken. 

Still trembled the melodious murmur of bells through 
the air, sweet as if the bells rang of the shining city, to 
Christian lingering on the shore. It was the marvel of 
many marvels of travel. The dawn opened dim eyes .at 
length, still dreaming of that sound, when the golden- 
sleeved Commander opened the blue door of the cabin, and 
the Howadji then heard the mingled moaning of many 
Sakias, but the sweet, far bells no more. 



XXII. 

" A motion from the river won, 
Ridged the smooth level, bearing on 
My shallop through the star-strown calm, 
Until another night in night 
I entered, from the clearer light, 
Imbo-wered vaults of pillar'd Palm." 

Humboldt, the only cosmopolitan and a poet, divides 
the earth by beauties, and celebrates as dearest to him, 
and fii-st fascinating him to travel, the climate of palms. 
The palm is the type of the tropics, and when the great 
Alexander marched triumphing through India, some Hin- 
doo, suspecting the sweetest secret of Brama, distilled a 
wine from the palm, the glorious fantasy of whose intoxi- 
cation no poet records. 

I knew a palm-tree upon Capri. It stood in select so- 
ciety of shining fig-leaves and lustrous oleanders ; it over- 
hung the balcony, and so looked, far overleaning, down 
upon the blue Mediterranean. Through the dream-mists of 
southern Italian noons, it looked up the broad bay of Na- 
ples and saw vague Vesuvius melting away ; or at sunset 
the isles of the Syrens, whereon they singing sat, and 
wooed Ulysses as he went ; or in the full May moonlight 



144 l^ILE NOTES. 



the oranges of Sorrento shone across it, great and golden, 
permanent planets of that delicious dark. And from the 
Sorrento where Tasso was born, it looked across to pleas- 
ant Posylippo, where Virgil is buried, and to stately 
Ischia. The palm of Capri saw all that was fairest and 
most famous in the bay of Naples. 

A wandering poet, whom I knew — sang a sweet song 
to the palm, as he dreamed in the moonlight upon that 
balcony. But it was only the free-masonry of sympathy. 
It was only syllabled moonshine. For the palm was a 
poet too, and all palms are poets. 

Yet when I asked the bard what the palm-tree sang 
in its melancholy measures of waving, he told me that not 
Vesuvius, nor the Syrens, nor Sorrento, nor Tasso, nor Vir- 
gil, the stately Ischia nor all the broad blue beauty of 
Naples bay, was the theme of that singing. But partly it 
sang of a river forever flowing, and of cloudless skies, and 
green fields that never faded, and the mournful music of 
water-wheels, and the wild monotony of a tropical life — 
and partly of the yellow silence of the Desert, and of drear 
solitudes inaccessible, and of wandering caravans, and 
lonely men. Then of gardens overhanging rivers, that 
roll gorgeous-shored through Western fancies — of gardens 
in Bagdad watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris, 
whereof it was the fringe and darling ornament — of oases 
in those sere sad deserts where it overfountained fountains, 
and every leaf was blessed. More than all, of the great 
Orient universally, where no tree was so abundant, so 
loved and so beautiful. 



UNDER THE PALMS. 145 

When I lay under that palm-tree in Capri in the May 
moonlight, my ears were opened, and I heard all that the 
poet had told me of its song. 

Perhaps it was because I came from Rome, where, the 
holy week comes into the year as Christ entered Jerusalem, 
over palms. For in the magnificence of St. Peter's, all 
the pomp of the most pompous of human institutions is bn 
one day charactered by the palm. The Pope borne upon 
his throne, as is no other monarch, — with, wide-waving 
Flabella attendant, moves, blessing the crowd through 
the great nave. All the red-legged cardinals follow, each 
of whose dresses would build a chapel, so costly are they, 
and the crimson-crowned Grreek patriarch with long silken 
black beard, and the crew of motley which the Roman 
clergy is, crowded after in shining splendor. 

No ceremony of imperial Rome had been more impos- 
ing, and never witnessed in a temple more imperial. But 
pope, patriarch, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, and all 
the lesser glories, bore palm branches in their hands. Not 
veritable palm branches, but their imitation in turned 
yellow wood ; and all through Rome that day, the palm 
branch was waving and hanging. Who could not see its 
beauty, even in the turned yellow wood ? Who did not 
feel it was a sacred tree as well as romantic ? 

For palm branches were strewn before Jesus as he 
rode into Jerusalem, and forever, since, the palm symbol- 
izes peace. Wherever a grove of palms waves in the low 
moonlight or starlight wind, it is the celestial choir 
chanting peace on earth, good-will to men. Therefore 

G 



146 NILE NOTES. 



is it the foliage of the old religious pictures. Mary sits 
under a palm, and the saints converse under palms, and 
the prophets prophesy in their shade, and cherubs float 
with palms over the Martyr's agony. Nor among pictures 
is there any more beautiful than Correggio's Flight into 
Egypt, wherein the golden-haired angels put aside the 
palm branches, and smile sunnily through, upon the lovely 
Mother and the lovely child. 

The palm is the chief tree in religious remembrance 
and religious art. It is the chief tree in romance and 
poetry. But its sentiment is always Eastern, and it 
always yearns for the East. In the West it is an exile, 
and pines in the most sheltered gardens. Among Western 
growths in the Yf estern air, it is as unsphered as Hafiz in 
a temperance society. Yet of all Western shores it is 
happiest in Sicily, for Sicily is only a bit of Africa drifted 
westward. There is a soft Southern strain in the Sicilian 
skies, and the palms drink its sunshine like dew. Upon 
the tropical plain behind Palermo, among the sun-suck- 
ing aloes, and the thick, shapeless cactuses, like elephants 
and rhinoceroses enchanted into foliage, it grows ever 
gladly. For the aloe is of the East, and the prickly pear, 
and upon that plain the Saracens have been, and the palm 
sees the Arabian arch, and the oriental sign-manual 
stamped upon the land. 

In the Yiila Serra di Falco, within sound of the vespers 
of Palermo, there is a palm beautiful to behold. It is like 
a Georgian slave in a Pacha's hareem. Softly shielded 
from eager winds, gently throned upon a slope of richest 



UNDER THE PALMS. 14Y 



green, fringed with brilliant and fragrant flowers, it stands 
separate and peculiar in the odorous garden air. Yet it 
droops and saddens, and bears no fruit. Vain is the ex- 
quisite environment of foreign fancies. The poor slave 
has no choice but life. Care too tender will not suffer it 
to die. Pride and admiration surround it with the best 
beauties, and feed it upon the warmest sun. But I heard 
it sigh as I passed. A wind blew warm fi-om the East, 
and it lifted its arms hopelessly, and when the wind, love- 
laden with most subtle sweetness, lingered, loth to fly, the 
palm stood motionless upon its little green mound, and the 
flowers were so fresh and fair — and the leaves of the trees 
so deeply hued, and the native fruit so golden and glad 
upon the boughs — ^that the still warm garden air, seemed 
only the silent, voluptuous sadness of the tree ; and had I 
been a poet my heart would have melted in song for the 
proud, pining palm. 

But the palms are not only poets in the West, they are 
prophets as well. They are like heralds sent forth upon 
the farthest points to celebrate to the traveler the glories 
they foreshow. Like spring birds they sing a summer un- 
fading, and climes where Time wears the year as a queen 
a rosary of diamonds. The mariner, eastward-sailing, 
hears tidings from the chance palms that hang along the 
southern Itahan shore. They call out to him across the 
gleaming calm of a Mediterranean noon, *' Thou happy 
mariner, our souls sail with thee." 

The first palm undoes the West. The Q,ueen of Sheba 
and the Princess Shemselnihar look then upon the most 



148 NILE NOTES 



Solomon of Howadji's. So far the Orient has come — ^not 
in great glory, not handsomely, but as Rome came to 
Britain in Roman soldiers. The crown of imperial glory 
glittered yet and only upon the seven hills, but a single ray 
had penetrated the northern night — and what the golden 
house of Nero was to a Briton contemplating a Roman sol- 
dier, is the East to the Howadji first beholding a palm. 

At Alexandria you are among them. Do not decry 
Alexandria as all Howadji do. To my eyes it was the il- 
luminated initial of the oriental chapter. Certainly it reads 
like its heading — camels, mosques, bazaars, turbans, baths 
and chibouques: and the whole East rows out to you, 
in the turbaned and fluttering-robed rascal who officiates 
as your pilot and moors you in the shadow of palms under 
the Pacha's garden. Malign Alexandria no more, although 
you do have your choice of camels or omnibuses to go to 
your hotel, for when you are there and trying to dine, the 
wild- eyed Bedoueen who serves you, will send you deep 
into the desert by his masquerading costume and his eager, 
restless eye, looking as if he would inomently spring 
through the window, and plunge into the desert depths. 
These Bedoueen or Arab servants are like steeds of the sun 
for carriage horses. They fly, girt with wild fascination, 
for what will they do next ? 

As you donkey out of Alexandria to Pompey's Pillar, 
you will pass a beautiful garden of palms, and by sunset 
nothing is so natural as to see only those trees. Yet the 
fascination is lasting. The poetry of the first exiles you 
saw, does not perish in the presence of the nation, for 



UNDER THE PALMS. 149 

those exiles stood beckoning like angels at the gate of Par- 
adise, sorrowfully ushering you into the glory whence 
themselves were outcasts forever :— and as you curiously 
looked in passing, you could not believe that their song was 
truth, and that the many would be as beautiful as the one. 

Thenceforward, in the land of Egypt, palms are per- 
petual. They are the only foliage of the Nile, for we will 
not harm the modesty of a few Mimosas and Sycamores by 
foolish claims. They are the shade of the mud villages, 
marking their site in the landscape, so that the groups of 
palms are the number of villages. They fringe the shore 
and the horizon. The sun sets golden behind them, and 
birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float glorious 
among their trunks ; on the ground beneath are flowers ; 
the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade nor the 
tobacco, and the yellow flowers of the cotton-plant star its 
dusk at evening. The children play under them, the old 
men crone and smoke, the donkeys graze, the surly bison 
and the conceited camels repose. The old Bible pictures 
are ceaselessly painted, but with softer, clearer colors than 
in the venerable book. 

The palm-grove is always enchanted. If it stretch in- 
land too alluringly, and you run ashore to stand under the 
bending boughs to share the peace of the doves swinging in 
the golden twilight, and to make yourself feel more scrip- 
turally, at least to surround yourself with sacred emblems, 
having small other hope of a share in the beauty of holi- 
ness — yet you will never reach the grove. You will gain 
the trees, but it is not the grove you fancied— that golden 



150 NILE NOTES. 



gloom will never be gained — it is an endless El Dorado 
gleaming along these shores. The separate columnar 
trunks ray out in foliage above, but there is no shade of a 
grove, no privacy of a wood, except, indeed, at sunset, 

" A privacy of glorious light." 

Each single tree has so little shade that the mass stand- 
ing at wide ease can never create the shady solitude, 
without which, there is no grove. 

But the eye never wearies of palms more than the ear 
of singing birds. Solitary they stand upon the sand, or 
upon the level, fertile land in groups, with a grace and 
dignity that no tree surpasses. Yery soon the eye beholds 
in their forms the original type of the columns which it 
will afterward admire in the temples. Almost the first 
palm is architecturally suggestive, even in those Western 
gardens — ^but to artists living among them and seeing only 
them ! Men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and 
the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly 
fashioned in the capitals, but in the flowery perfection of 
the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those 
columns came from Egypt, and that which was the sus- 
picion of the earlier workers, was the success of more deli- 
cate designing. So is the palm in wound with our art and 
poetry and religion, and of all trees would the Howadji be a 
palm, v^de-waving peace and plenty, and feeling his kin 
to the Parthenon and Raphael's pictures. 

But nature is absolute taste, and has no pure orna- 



1 



UNDER THE PALMS. 151 

ment, so that the palm is no less useful than beautiful. 
The family is infinite and ill understood. The cocoa-nut, 
date and sago, are all palms. Ropes and sponges are 
wrought of the tough interior fiber. The various fruits are 
nutritious, the wood, the roots and the leaves are all con- 
sumed. It is one of nature's great gifts to her spoiled sun- 
darlings. Whoso is born of the sun is made free of the 
world. Like the poet Thomson, he may put his hands in 
his pockets and eat apples at leisure. 

I do not find that the Egyptians ever deified the palm, 
as some of them did the crocodile. And therein I find a 
want of that singular shrewdness of perception which the 
Poet Martineau perpetually praises in that antique people. 
It was a miserably cowardly thing to make a Grod of a 
Dragon, who dined and supped upon you and your friends 
whenever he could catch you ; who did nothing but stretch 
his scales upon the sand in the sun ; and left only suspi- 
cious musk-balls as a legacy to his worshipers. To deify 
that mole-eyed monster, and then carefully embalm the 
dead abomination, looked very like fear, spite of Thothmes, 
Psamitticus, and Ramses the Great. For meanwhile, the 
land entertained angels unawares. They were waving 
gracious wings over the green fields, and from the womb 
of plenty dropped the sweet nutritious dates, and from the 
plumage of those wings were houses thatched. And every 
part of the beautiful body, living or dead, was a treasure 
to the mole-eyed Crocodile- worshipers. The land was 
covered with little G-ods, whispering peace and plenty, but 
they were no more deified than the sweet stray thoughts 



152 NILE NOT^S. 



of the villagers. Indeed, Poet Harriet, your erudite Egyp- 
tians went out of their way to worship devils. 

They do better even to this day, higher up the river. 
Along the remote shores of the white Nile, are races wild 
and gentle, who extract the four lower front teeth for 
beauty, and worship the great trees. And truly, in the 
Tropics, the great tree is a great Grod. Far outspreading 
shielding arms, he folds his worshipers from the burning 
sun, and wrestles wondrously with the wildest gales. 
Eirds build in the sweet security of his shade. Fruit ri- 
pens and falls unt ended from his beneficent boughs. At 
midnight the winds converse with him, and he hides the 
stars. He outlives generations, and is a cherished tra- 
dition. 

There is a Grodlike Gfod ! A great tree could proselyte 
even among Christians. The Boston elm has moved 
hearts that Park-street and Brattle-street have never in- 
tenerated. There is a serious, sensible worship I The 
God hath duration, doth nothing harm, and imparts very 
tangible blessings. The Egyptian worship of the croco- 
dile is very thin, measured by this Dinka religion of the 
tree. And is the crocodile's a loftier degree of life than 
the tree's ? 

It is the date-palm which is so common and graceful 
in Egypt. Near Asyoot, the ascending Howadji sees for 
the first time the Dom palm. This is a heavier, huskier 
tree, always forked. It has a very tropical air, and solves 
the mystery of gingerbread nuts. For if the hard, brown 
fruit of the Dom be not the hard, brown nuts which our 



UNDER THE PALMS. 153 

credulous youth ascribed to the genius of the baker at the 
corner, they are certainly the type of those gingered blisses, 
and never did the Howadji seem to himself more hopelessly 
lost in the magic of Egypt and the East, than when he 
plucked gingerbread from a palm-tree. ^ 

The Dom is coarse by the side of the feathery date- 
palm, like a clumsy brake among maiden hair ferns. It 
is tropically handsome, but is always the plebeian palm. 
It has clumsy hands and feet, and, like a frowsy cook, 
gawks in the land. But, plumed as a prince and graceful 
as a gentleman, stands the date, and whoever travels 
among palms, travels in good society. Southward stretch- 
es the Ibis, and morning and evening sees few other trees. 
They sculpture themselves upon memory more fairly than 
upon these old columns. The wave of their boughs hence- 
forward, wherever you are, will be the wave of the magi- 
cian's wand, and you will float again upon the Nile, and 
wonder how were shaped the palms upon the shore when 
Adam sailed with Eve down the rivers of Eden. 



xxm. 

aims! dD #liD|ikn|in. 

There are but two sounds in Egypt, the sigh of the 
Sakia and the national cry of '> Bucksheesh, Howadji" — 
Alms, Shopkeeper ! Add the ceaseless bark of curs, if 
you are Trinitarian, and you will find your mystic number 
everywhere made good. 

''Bucksheesh Howadji," is the universal greeting. 
From all the fields, as you stroll along the shore or sail up 
the river, swells this vast shout. Young and old and both 
sexes, in every variety of shriek, whine, entreaty, demand, 
contempt, and indifference, weary the Howadji's soul with 
the incessant cry. Little children who can not yet talk, 
struggle to articulate it. Father and mother shout it in 
full chorus. The boys on the tongues of Sakias, the ebony 
statues at the Shadoofs, the specters in the yellow-blos- 
somed cotton-field, or standing among the grain, break 
their long silence with this cry only, "Alms, Shop- 
keeper." 

It is not always a request. Grirls and boys laugh as 
they shout it, nor cease picking cotton or cutting stalks. 
Groups of children with outstretched hands, surround you 



ALMS! O SHOPKEEPER. 155 

in full chorus, if you pause to sketch or shoot or loiter. 
They parry your glances with the begging. Have the 
sleepy-souled Egyptians learned that if Howadji have evil 
eyes, there is no surer spell to make them disappear than 
an appeal to their pockets ? Like a prayer, the whole 
land repeats the invocation, and with the usual amount of 
piety and the pious. 

Yet sometimes it is an imperial demand, and you would 
fancy Belisarius or Ramses the Great sat begging upon 
the bank. Sauntering in a golden sunset along the shore 
at Edfoo, a wandering minstrel in the grass tapped his 
tarabuka as the Howadji passed, that they should ren- 
der tribute. The unnoting Howadji passed on. Thank- 
less trade the tax-gatherer, thou tarabuka thrummer ! — 
and he looked after us with contempt for the Christian 
dogs. 

Farther on a voice shouted, as if the Howadji had 
passed a shrine unkneeling, ''Shopkeepers! Shopkeep- 
ers !" But dignity is deaf, and they sauntered on. Then 
more curtly and angrily, " Shopkeepers ! Shopkeepers !" — 
as if a man had discovered false weight in his wares. And 
constantly nearing, the howl of Howadji grew intolerable, 
until there was a violent clapping of hands, and a blear- 
eyed Egyptian ran in front of us like a ragingly mad em- 
peror, " Alms ! Shopkeeper !" " To the devil, Egyp- 
tian !" 

For no shopkeeper on record ever gave alms except to 
the miserable, deformed, old, and blind. They are the 
only distinctions you can make or maintain in an other- 



156 NILE T^OTES. 



wise monotonous mass of misery. Nation of beggars, 
effortless, effete, bucksheesh is its prominent point of 
contact with the Howadji, who, revisiting the Nile in 
dreams, hears far-sounding and forever, *' Alms, Shop- 
keeper." 



XXIV. 

" Some from farthest South — 
Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, 
Meroe, Nilotick isle." 

Approaching Assouan, or the Greek Syene, which we 
will henceforth call it, as more graceful and musical, the 
high bluffs with bold masses of rock heralded a new 
scenery — and its sharp lofty forms were like the pealing 
trumpet tones, announcing the crisis of the struggle. It 
was a pleasant January morning, that the Ibis skimmed 
along the shore. The scenery was bolder than any she had 
seen in her flight. Rocks broke the evenness of the river's 
surface, and in the heart of the hills the river seemed 
to end, it was so shut in by the rocky cliffs and points. 

The town Syene is a dull mud mass, like all other 
Egyptian towns. But palms spread luxuriantly along the 
bank, and on the shores of Elephantine, the island oppo- 
site — sweeps and slopes of greenery stretched westward 
from the eye. 

Upon that shore the eye lingers curiously upon the 
remains of a Christian convent, where there are vet 



158 NILE NOTES, 



grottoes, formerly used as chapels and shrines, and still as 
you look and linger, the forms and faces of Christian lands 
begin to rise, and reel before your fancy, and you half 
fear, while you are fascinated, that the East will fade in 
that Western remembrance, until some Arab beldame — 
brown and unhuman as a mummy from the hills, and 
fateful as Atropos, peers into your dreaming eyes, and 
tells you that on that site, an old King of the land buried 
incredible treasure, before he went to war against the 
Nubians. The miserly monarch left nothing for his family 
or friends, and all was committed to the charge of an 
austere Magician. Years passed, and the King came no 
.more. The relatives sought to obtain the treasure, and 
foiling the Magician slew him upon the shore. But dying, 
he lived more terribly — for he rose a huge serpent, that 
devoured all his assailants. Years pass, and the King 
comes no more. Yet the serpent still watches the treasure, 
and once every midnight, at the culmination of certain 
stars, he descends to the Nile to drink, while so wonder- 
ful a light streams from his awful head — that if the King 
comes not, it is not because he can not see the way. Were 
the Aurora in the East, the Howadji would suspect the 
secret, and when it shone no more, know that the King 
had returned to Syene. 

It is the city of the cataract. Built at the entrance 
of the rapids, it is the chief point for the Nubian-bound 
voyager, and is the borne of most Nile travelers. The 
Ibis had flown hither from Cairo in twenty-two days— a 
flight well flown, for we had met melancholy Howffdji, 



SYENE. 159 



who had been fifty days from Alexandria. And the Ancient 
Mariner of the Nile — will he ever behold Syene, or see it 
only a palm-fringed mirage upon the shore, as he dashes 
up and down the cataract ? But do not turn there, re- 
flective reader, when you ascend the Nile. Believe no 
Verde G-iovanes who give breakfasts on Philae, and decry 
Nubia. Push on, farther and faster — as if you must ride 
the equator before you pause — as if you could not sink 
deep enough in the strangeness and sweetness of tropical 
travel. Believe an impartial Howadji who has no Cangie 
or other boats to let at Mahratta, that Nubia is a very 
different land from Egypt, and that you have not pene- 
trated antiquest Egypt, until you have been awe-stricken 
by the silence which was buried ages ago in Aboo Simbel, 
and by the hand-folded Osiride figures, that people, like 
dumb and dead G-ods, that dim, demonic hall. 

The beach of Syene was busy. Small craft were load- 
ing, and swarms of naked boys were driving little donkeys 
laden with sacks of dates, gum-arabic, tamarinds and 
other burdens, from Sennaar, and the tropical interior, 
pleasant to the imagination as to the taste. Huge camels 
loomed in the background, sniffing serenely, and growling 
and grumbling, as they were forced to kneel, and pon- 
derous loads were heaped upon their backs. Shattered 
hulks of Dahabieh and Cangie lay, bare-ribbed carcasses, 
upon the sand, and deformed and blear-eyed wrecks of 
men and women crept, worm -like, in and out of them. 
Men and women, too, in coarse blankets, or Mrs. Bull's 
blue night-gowns, brought all kinds of savage spears, and 



160 NILE NOTES, 



clubs, and ostrich eggs, and gay baskets, and clustered 
duskily on the shore opposite the boat, and waited silently 
and passionlessly until they could catch the eye of the 
Howadji — ^then as silently elevated their wares with one 
hand, and with the other held up indicative fingers of the 
price. Unless trade more active goes on with other Da- 
habieh than with the Ibis, the Howadji suspects the blan- 
keted and night-gowned Syenites do not live solely by 
such barter. Behind this activity, unwonted and unseen 
hitherto, a grove of thick palms broad-belted the beach — 
over which in a blue sky burned the noonday sun. 

The Howadji landed, nevertheless, and rode through 
the town on donkeys. Dry dust under foot, yellow, ratty- 
looking dogs barking from the mud-caked roofsj women 
unutterable, happily hiding their faces, men blanketed or 
naked, idly staring, sore-eyed children beseeching buck- 
sheesh, woeless want everywhere, was the sum of sight 
in Syene. Thither, in times past, Juvenal was banished, 
and, dungeoned in Africa, had leisure to repent his satire 
and remember Rome. For the Romans reared a city here, 
and Sir Gardiner found remains some years since. But it 
was hard to believe that any spot could so utterly decay, 
upon which Rome had once set its seal. To a tourist from 
the lost Pleiad, there would have been very little differ- 
ence between the brown mummies who stood silent among 
the huts of Syene and the yellow ratty curs that barked 
peevishly, as our donkeys trotted along. Brutes can never 
sink beneath a certain level. But there is no certain level 
of degradation beneath which men may not fall. The ex- 



SYENE. 161 



istence of the Syenites is as morally inexplicable as that 
of loathsome serpents in lonely deserts. In these lands 
you seem to have reached the outskirts of creation — the 
sink of nature — and almost suspect that its genius is too 
indolent ever to be entirely organized. For all strength 
should be sweet, and all force made fair — a fact which is 
clearly forgotten or disproved in Syene. 

The Howadji left the houses, and were instantly in the 
desert — the wild, howling wilderness, that stretches un- 
greened to the Rpd Sea. It was not a plain of sand, but 
a huge hilliness of rock and sand commingled. There 
was none of the grandeur of the sand-sea, for there was no 
outlet for the eye to the horizon. It was like that craggy, 
desolate, diamond-strewn valley, into which Sinbad was 
carried by the Roc. All around us there was much glit- 
tering, but I saw few gems. One solitary man was water- 
ing with a Shadoof a solitary inclosure of sand. A few 
spare blades of grass, like the hairs on a bald head, were 
visible here and there, but nothing to reward such toil. It 
faintly greened the sand, that small inclosure, but the man 
at his hopeless labor was a fitting figure for the landscape. 

Among the tombs, grouped together in the desert, the 
Howadji seemed hundreds of miles from men. There is 
nothing so dreary as an Egyptian burial-place. It is 
placed always on the skirts of the desert, where no green 
thing is. Huge scaly domes, like temples where ghouls 
worship, were open to the wild winds, and the stones lay 
irregularly scattered, buried in the sand. It was Lido- 
like, because it was sand, but inexpressibly sadder than 



162 NILE NOTES. 



those Hebrew graves upon the Adriatic shore, for here the 
desert, illimitable, stole all hope away. 

A solitary camel passed, phantom-like, with his driver. 
Noiseless their tread. No word was spoken, no sign made. 
The Muslim looked at us impassibly, as if we had been 
grotesque carvings upon the tombs. The low wind went 
pacing deliriously through the defiles. The silent solitude 
stifled thought, and seemed to numb the soul with its 
deadness. But suddenly palms waved over us like hands 
of blessing, and, caressing the shore of Syene, ran the vic- 
tor of the desert, blue-armored from his cataract triumph. 



XXV. 

At sunset a cloud of dust. 

It was a donkey cavalcade, descending the beach. 
Foremost rode the Captain of the Cataract, habited blackly, 
with a white turban. The pilotage through the cataract 
is the monopoly of a club of pilots (Mercury, God of com- 
merce, forgive the name !) with some one of which the 
bargain must be concluded. They all try to cheat each 
other, of course ; and probably manage the affairs of the 
partnership, by allowing each member in turn an illimita- 
ble chance of cheating. The white-turbaned, black-hab- 
ited donkestrian, was the very Reis of Reises, the sinfulest 
sinner. 

Behind him thronged a motley group, cantering upon 
small donkeys. At length the spell was successful, and 
the spirits were coming. Black spirits and white, blue 
spirits and gray, were mingled and mingling. Long men 
and short, bald and grisly, capped and turbaned variously, 
and swathed in ungainly garments, that flew and fluttered 
in the breeze of their speed, and blent with the dust of the 
donkeys, made great commotion in the golden quiet of sunset. 



164 NILE NOTES, 



The cavalcade was magically undonkeyed, the savages 
sprang and shambled, and tumbled off, while their beasts 
were yet in full motion, and were mounting the plank and 
plunging upon the Ibis, before the animals had fairly 
halted. Then ensued the greeting, the salaaming. This 
is an exquisitely ludicrous ceremony to the spectator. It 
commences with touching hands and repeating some for- 
mula of thanksgiving and prayer. It continues by touch- 
ing hands and repeating the formula, which is by no means 
brief, and is rattled off as unconcernedly as Roman priests 
rattle off their morning masses, looking all around and 
letting the v/ords run. When it is finished, the parties 
kiss their own hands and separate. Grenerally having 
nothing to say, they go apart after this elaborate greeting, 
and separate silently at last, unless as usual they quarrel 
stoutly before parting. 

It was amusing to see the Commander conducting this 
ceremony with several. The point seemed to be, who 
should have the last word. When the innocent spectator 
supposed the How-d'ye-do already said, the actors burst 
forth again, and- kept bursting forth until kissing time. It 
shows the value of time to a people who are fifteen min- 
utes saying, "how are you." And yet the Syenites and all 
other Egyptians have the advantage of us in some ways. 
They salaam at great length, and then having nothing to 
say, are silent. We salaam very briefly, and then having 
nothing to say, talk a great deal. After all, some Howadji 
doubt whether a Syenite Reis, sitting silent in the sunset 
smoking his pipe, is not as fair a figure to imagination as 



THETREATYOFSYENE. 165 



Verde Griovane, or all the Piu Griovanes sitting in white 
gloves and bright boots, and talking through an act in an 
opera-box. 

The salaaming accomplished, the savages seated them- 
selves about the deck. The Captain of the Cataract, as 
one of the high contracting parties, sat next the cabin, be- 
fore which sat the other party — the Howadji. The Com- 
mander of the Faithful, in full pontificals, enthroned him- 
self upon a chair in the center of the deck. Chibouques 
were lighted, coffee brought by the Hadji Hamed, whose 
solemnity was not softened as on that Terpsichorean night 
at Esne, and zealously puffing and sipping, the council 
commenced. 

The Howadji knows no occasion, except similar diplo- 
matic assemblies, which could present a group of more im- 
becile faces. The want of pride, of manliness, of dignity, 
of force, of all that makes the human face divine, was 
supplied by an expression of imbecile cunning, ridiculously 
transparent. The complexions were of every color, from 
yellow copper to Nubian deadness of blackness. It was as 
hateful to be treating with such human caricatures, as it 
would have been with apes. The natural savage may be 
noble — certainly the records of Indian life are rich in dig- 
nity, heroism and manliness. But a race effete— the last 
lees of what was a nation, are not to be gilded when they 
have sunken into imbecility, because the elder inhabitants 
of the land were noble. Howbeit the poet Martineau could 
watch these men and sing rapturously of "the savage 
faculty," Learn at Syene, unpoetio Howadji I that not 



166 NILE NOTES. 



the savage faculty of a dotard race, but the pure provi- 
dence of G-od, takes you up and down the Cataract. 

The conditions of the treaty, as of many others, were 
mostly understood before the Congress assembled. Prolix 
palaver and the dexterous seizing of chance advantages, 
were the means of attaining those conditions, and the 
Commander shook out his golden-sleeves, as Metternich his 
powdered wig at Vienna, then crossed his eyes like the 
arbiter of many fates, and said, pleasantly puffing, in 
Arabic — 

"You took up an English boat this morning?" 

The Captain of the Cataract responded " Taib," mean- 
ing, '' yes, very true ;" and the high contractors smoked sig- 
nificantly. 

" A good wind for passing the Cataract," continued the 
Commander. No answer, but a ceasless puffing, and a 
dubious, indifferent shrug. The fact being so, and the 
passage much depending upon the wind, it was an ad- 
vantage, say the five of trumps, for the Commander, and 
there was a brief silence. Not to irritate by following up 
advantages. Golden-sleeve suggested mildly, " Quite a 
pleasant day," and smiled benignly upon the last rosy 
blushings of the West. 

" Quite a pleasant day," retorted the Reis, without 
showing his hand, but meditating a play. 

The Captain of the Cataract raised his eyes carelessly 
to the far outspreading yards of the Ibis, glanced along her 
deck with his shrunken, soulless orbs, puffed portentously, 
then slowly said, " Your boat is too large to go up the 



THE TREATY OF SYENE. IQl 

Cataract." The Knave of Trumps, for the boat was very 
large. 

But the Commander puffed, and the Reis puffed, and 
we all puffed, as if nothing had been said. The motley 
cavalcade of the Reis squatted upon the deck, stared at 
the Howadji, and listened to the talk, while they passed a 
nargileh around the circle, and grunted and groaned in- 
tense satisfaction and delight. 

" This boat went up the Cataract last year," com- 
menced the Commander, as if opening up an entirely new 
topic, and quite ignoring the knave. Silence again, and 
great cloudiness from the chibouques. 

'' Many boats pass up this year ?" 

" Many, and pay high." The Commander lost that lift. 

Grradually the face of Grolden-sleeve settled into a semi- 
sternness of expression. He exhaled smolte with the air 
of a man whose word was final, and in whose propositions 
the finger of fate was clearly to be discerned, and whom 
to withstand, would be the sin against the Pacha. Curious 
to contemplate I In the degree that the Commander's 
face waxed stern, and his eyes darkened with decision, 
crept a feline softness of sweetness over the visage of the 
Reis of Reises, and his mole eyes more miserably dwindled, 
and the smoke curled more lightly from his pipe. His 
body squirmed snake-like as he glanced, sycophantically 
entreating, at the Howadji. How clearly the crisis was 
coming ! Astute Commander in full pontificals ! 

At length like a bold lover the Grolden-sleeve popped 
the question. Then what smiling, what snaky sweetness, 
what utter inability to reply. 



168 NILE IfOTES 



" Tell him," said the Pacha, " that going or staying is 
quite indifferent to us — " 

The Captain of the Cataract received the interpretation 
like glad tidings, and smiled as if it would solace his soul, 
te embrace the company. 

The question was popped again — 

"Six hundred piasters," simpered, almost inaudibly, 
the old sinner. 

" Damn ! Six hundred devils," exclaimed the Comman- 
der in English, shoving his chair back — frowning and 
springing up. "We'll not go." And the golden-sleeved 
cloak became suddenly a gilt-edged cloud, pregnant with 
the maddest tempests. 

But unconcerned puffed the Captain of the Cataract, 
smoking as serenely^ as Vesuvius during a Norway gale— 
and unconcerned puffed all the lieutenants and majors and 
under-scrubbery of the cataract, as if the world were not 
about to end. 

Innocent Howadji ! It was only part of the play. 
The Commander's face and manner said plainly enough 
all the time, " If you think I come hither as a lion it 
were pity of my life," and presently he sat down again 
with a fresh pipe, and another fingan of mocha, calmly as 
any other actor who has made a point, but will waive your 
approbation. Mildly smoking, he suggested pleasantly, 

" "We don't pay six hundred piasters." 

Smoky silence — 

" We pay about four hundred and fifty." 

Smoky silence — 



THETREATYOFSYENE. 169 

" Taib — good," said the Captain of the Cataract, that 
being the preconceived price of both parties. 

A general commotion ensued, — an universal shaking 
as after sermon in Christian churches, — when this word 
was said. Followed much monosyllabic discourse, also 
grave grunting, and a little more salaaming among the 
belated sinners. Chibouques were refilled, fingans freely 
circulated, and the resonance of satisfactory smacks clearly 
excited the wonder and envy of the unfavored pedlars 
who still stood along the beach. The Reis of Reises 
looked about him with a great deal of expectation and anx- 
iety, of which no notice was taken, until he made bold to 
suggest interrogatively, '' A little something else ?" — mean- 
ing brandy, which the Commander brought, and of which 
the Reis emptied two such mighty measures, that if there 
be virtue in Cognac, he was undonkeyed before that hour of 
night when the serpent-magician glares glorious over Syene. 

Suddenly the Congress rose. The Reis of the Cataract 
smiled approvingly upon the Howadji as if they were very 
pretty men, to be very prettily done by a grisly old 
mummy of an Egyptian, then salaamed, kissed his hand 
and stepped ashore. When he was fairly landed, I saw 
the Commander assisting the confused crowd of under- 
scrubbery out of the boat, with his kurbash or whip of 
hippopotamus hide. They all clattered out, chattering 
and fluttering ; and tumbling on to their donkeys, one of the 
high contracting parties shambled up the beach, and dis- 
appeared in a cloud of dust among the palms 

And the Treaty of Syene was concluded. 
H 



XXVI. 

The Ibis went up the cataract. 

In that pleasant, spacious dining-room of Shepherd's 
at Cairo, after billiard-exhilaration of a pleasant morning, 
men ask each other, over a quiet tiffin, " You went up 
the cataract ?" as if boats leaped cataracts, as lovers scale 
silken ladders to their ladies. 

The Ibis, however, went up the cataract. Imaginative 
youth will needs picture the Ibis dashing dexterously up a 
Nile Niagara, nor deem that in mystic Egypt is any thing 
impossible. Nor can that imagination picture scenes more 
exciting. Only now let us more sedately sail, for stranger 
scenery than this, no man sees in long voyaging. 

Early on the morrow of the Treaty, a mad rabble took 
possession of the Ibis. They came tumbling and pitching 
in, wild and wan and grotesque as the eager ghosts that 
file into Charon's barque when it touches the Stygian shore. 
The Captain of captains had gone round by land to meet 
us at a certain point in the rapid, but had sent a substitute 
to pilot our way until we met him. The new rabble ran 
around the deck tumbling over each other, shouting, chatter- 



THE CATARACT. ' Hi 

ing, staring at the Hadji Hamed's kitchen arrangements, 
and the peculiarities of the Howadji — and the whole devil's 
row was excited and stirred up constantly by a sagacious 
superintendent with a long kurbash, who touched the re- 
fractory where cherubs are intangible, taking good care 
that the row should be constantly more riotous, and 
nothing be effected but his abundant castigation. Our own 
crew were superfluous for the nonce, and lay around the 
deck useless as the Howadji. A bright sun shone — a fair 
breeze blew, and we slipped quietly away from the shore 
of Syene. 

The Ibis rounded a rook, and all greenness and placid 
palm beauty vanished. "We were on the outskirts of the 
seething struggle between the two powers. Narrow and 
swift, and dark and still, like a king flying from a terrible 
triumph, flowed our royal river. Huge hills of jagged rock 
impended. Boulders lay in the water. White sand shored 
the stream, stretching sometimes among the rocks in short 
sweeps, whose dazzling white contrasted intensely with the 
black barriers of rock. High on a rocky peak glared a 
shekh's white tomb, the death's-head in that feast of ter- 
rible fascination and delight, and smoothly sheering preci- 
pices below, gave Hope no ledge to gi*asp in falling, but 
let it slip and slide inevitably into the black gulf beneath. 
The wreck of a Dahabieh lay high-lifted upon the rocks in 
the water, against the base of the cliff, its sycamore ribs 
white-rotting, like skeletons hung for horror and warning 
around the entrance of Castle Despair. All about us was 
rock ponderously piled, and the few sand strips. Every 



172 NILE NOTES. 



instant the combinations changed, so narrow was the chan- 
nel, and every moment the scenery was more savage. 

The wind blew us well, and the sharp quick eye of the 
pilot minded well our course. Sometimes we swept by 
rocks nearly enough to touch them. Sometimes the doubt- 
ful Ibis seemed inevitably driving into a cliff, but bent 
away as she approached, and ran along the dark, solemn 
surface of the river. Three miles of such sailing, then 
the cataract. 

It is a series of rocky rapids. There is no fall of water, 
only a foaming, currenty slope, as in all rapids. The cata- 
ract is the shock of the struggle between the desert and 
the river. The crisis announced long since by the threat- 
ening sand-heights, has arrived. Through your dreamy 
avenue of palm twilight and silence, you have advanced 
to no lotus isles, but to a fierce and resounding battle — 
that sense of fate announced it in the still sunniness of the 
first mornings. But it seemed then only shadowy, even 
seductive in awfulness, like death to young imaginations. 
At Syene, this sunny morning, it has become a stirring 
reality. Pressing in from Libya and Arabia, the interven- 
ing greenness overwhelmed, the insatiate rocks and sands 
here grasp the shoulders of the river, and hurl their shat- 
tered crags into its bosom. 

Bleak, irregular mounds and hills and regularly layered 
rock, rise and slope and threaten all around. Down the 
steep sides of the mountains, here reaching the river, like 
a headlong plunge of disordered cavalry, roll fragments of 
stone of every size and shape. Like serried fronts, im- 



THE CATARACT. 173 

movable, breasting the burden of the battle, the black 
smooth precipices stand in the rushing stream. Then pile 
upon pile, fantastic, picturesque, strange, but never sub- 
lime, like foes lifted upon foes to behold the combat, the 
intricate forms of rock crowd along the shore. 

It is the desert's enthusiastic descent — its frenzied 
charge of death or victory. Confusion confounded, deso- 
lated desolation, never sublime, yet always solemn, with a 
sense of fate in the swift-rushing waters, that creates a 
somber interest, not all unhuman, but akin to dramatic 
intensity. 

The Nile, long dallying in placid Nubia, lingers lovingly 
around templed Philae — ^the very verge of the vortex. It 
laves the lithe flowers along its shore, and folds it in a 
beautiful embrace. It sees what it saw there, but what 
it sees no longer. Is its calm the trance of memory or of 
love? What were the Ptolemies and their temples and 
their lives ; what those of all their predecessors there, but 
various expressions sweet and strange, that flushed along 
the face of the Nile's idol, but fleetly faded ? It lingers 
on the very verge of the vortex, then, unpausing, plunges 
in. Foamingly furious, it dashes against the sharp rocks 
and darts beyond them. Scornfully sweeping, it seethes 
over ambuscades of jagged stone below. Through tortu- 
ous channels here, through wild ways there, it leads its 
lithe legion undismayed, and the demon desert is foiled 
forever. 

Then royally raging, a king with dark brows thought- 
ful, the Nile sweeps solemnly away from the terrible 



114: NILE NOTES. 



triumph — but caresses palm-belted Syene as it flies, and 
calms itself gradually beyond, among serene green shores. 
The Ibis reached ihe first rapid. The swift rush of 
the river and the favoring wind held it a long time sta- 
tionary. Had the wind lulled, she would have swung 
round suddenly with the stream, and plunged against the 
rocks that hemmed her — rocks watching the Ibis as in- 
exorably as desert monsters their prey. 

Suddenly a score of savages leaped shouting and naked 
into the water, and buffeting the rapid, reached a rock 
with a rope. This they clumsily attached to a stump^ 
and the yelling savages on board pulled at it and drew us 
slowly up. Like imps and demons, the black sinners clam- 
bered over the sharp points and along the rocks, shouting 
and plunging into the rapid, to reach another rock — -at 
home as much in the black water as out of it — madly 
dancing and deviling about ; so that, surveying the mum- 
my-swathed groups on deck, and the hopeless shores and 
the dark devils, the Nile was the Nile no longer, but the 
Styx, and the Ibis, Charon's barque of death. The tumult 
was terrible. No one seemed to command, and the super- 
intendent kept up a vigorous application of the kurbash to 
the adjacent shoulders, but without the slightest practical 
influence upon the voyage. In the hellish howling of the 
rabble, and sure swiftness and dash of the stream, a little 
silent sense had been heavenly. For the channels are so 
narrow that it needs only a strong rope and a strong pull 
to insure the ascent. A few blocks, beams, and pulleys, 
ipon points where a purchase is necessary, would malve 



THE CATARACT. 175 

the ascent rapid and easy. There are, at this point, not 
more than four or five rapids, a few yards wide each one, 
at the narrowest. Between these hell-gates, there is room 
to sail, if there be wind enough, and if not, the tracking, 
with many men, is not arduous. 

The poet Martineau and Belzoni are at issue upon the 
" savage faculty." This mystery, of which the Howadji 
could never discover the slightest trace, charmed the poet 
Harriet particularly at this point. Belzoni says of these 
men, that their utmost sagacity reaches only to pulling a 
rope, or sitting on the extremity of a lever as a counter- 
poise ; and he also, in a very unpoetic fervor, declares that 
in point of skill, they are no better than beasts. Certainly 
it would be strange if a race so ignorant and clumsy in all 
things else, should develop fine faculties here. These de- 
mons drew the Ibis up the rapids, as they would have 
drawn a wagon up a hill — the success and the lo paeans 
are due to the strength of the rope. Had the poet Harriet 
ever shot the Sault Sainte Marie with a silent Indian in a 
birch shell, she might have beheld and chanted the '' sav- 
age faculty." But this immense misdirection of the force 
of an hundred or more men, deserves no lyric. 

The Ibis was drawn through two rapids, and then the 
Captain of the Cataract appeared upon the shore, mounted 
on a donkey and surrounded by a staff or a council of min- 
isters, similarly mole-eyed and grisly. I fancied, at first, 
the apparition was only a party of mummies donkeying 
along through the cataract, to visit some friendly Nubian 
mummies in the hills beyond. For the cataract is a kind 



176 NILE NOTES. 



of "wolf's glen," and phantoms and grotesque ghosts of 
every kind are to be expected; but they slid off their 
beasts and shuffled down the sand slope to the shore and 
sprang aboard, helping up the most shriveled of mummies, 
who was presented to the Howadji as the father of the 
Captain of the Cataract, and it was clearly expected by 
the Captain and the crew that that fact would be recog- 
nized in a flowing horn of brandy, as partly discharging 
the world's debt to old grisly, for begetting that pilot and 
very Eeis of very Reises — 

" Sing George the Third, and not the least in TVorth, 
For graciously begetting George the Fourth." 

The brandy was served, and the Howadji stepped ashore 
to visit Philee, while the Ibis cleared the rest of the rapids 
and met them at Mahratta, the first Nubian village. 



XXVII. 

" BucKSHEESH HowADJi — Buchsheesh. Howadji," wel- 
comed us to Nubia. A group of naked little negroes with 
donkeys awaited us on the bank, and intoned the national 
hymn, " Alms, Shopkeeper," as we mounted through 
the sand. The Howadji straddled the donkeys, for you do 
not mount a donkey more than you would a large dog, 
and sitting upon a thick cloth, the steed's only trapping, 
and nothing but the Howadji's nimble management of his 
legs to keep that on, away we went, helter skelter, over 
the sand — shamble, trot, canter, tumble, up again and 
ahead, jerking and shaking upon the little beasts, that bal- 
anced themselves along as if all four legs at once were 
necessary to support such terrible Howadji weights. 

Away we dashed, scrambling along the bank. The 
sky cloudless — burning the sun — wild the waste shore. 
Ledges of rock lay buried in the sand, and at the head of 
the cataract, its Nubian mouth, a palm-shaded village. 
Fantastically frowning everywhere, the chaos of rook, and 
beyond and among, the river in shining armor, sinuous in 
the foaming struggle. 



lis NILE NOTES. 



It was pure desert — a few patclies of green grew mis- 
erable in the sand, forlorn as Christian pilgrims in Saracen 
Jerusalem. The bold formlessness of the cliffs allured the 
eye. Seen from the shore they are not high, but the mighty 
masses, irregularly strewn and heaped, crowding and con- 
centrating upon the river, shrinking along the shores, yet 
strewn in the stream, and boldly buffeting its fury, are 
fascinatingly fantastic. Your eye, so long used to actual 
silence, and a sense of stillness in the forms and charac- 
ters of the landscape, is unnaturally excited, and bounds 
restlessly from rock to river, as if it had surprised Nature 
in a move, and should see sudden and startling changes. 
The Howadji has caught her in this outlawed corner 
before her arrangments were completed. She is setting up 
the furniture of her scenery. This rock is surely to be 
shifted there, and that point to be swept away, here. 
There is intense expectation. Ah ! if the Howadji had not 
traveled in vain, but should really see something and un- 
derstand the secret significance of cataracts ! 

But a sudden donkey-quake wrecked all speculation, 
and like a tower shaken, but recovering itself from falling, 
the Howadji allowed the quake to "reel unheededly away," 
and alighted quietly upon his left leg, while the liberated 
donkey smelt about for food in the sand, like an ass. The 
soaring speculations of the moment upon the text of the 
prospect, had made the Howadji too unmindful that the 
nimble clinging of his legs to the donkey's ribs was the 
sole belly-band of his cloth and warrant of his seat ; so the 
three went suddenly asunder, donkey, Howadji and cloth, 



NUBIAN WELCOME. 179 

but reuniting, went forward again into Nubia, an uncer- 
tain whole. 

The barking of dogs announced our arrival at Mahratta, 
the first Nubian village. Dull, mud Syene was only three 
miles distant over the desert. Yet here mud was plaster, 
smooth and neat, and the cleanliness of the houses — a cer- 
tain regular grace in them — the unvailed faces of the 
women, and their determined color, for they were em- 
phatically black — made Nubia pleasant, at once and for- 
ever. These women braiding baskets, or busily spinning 
in the sun, with mild features, and soft eyes — their woolly 
hair frizzling all over their heads, and bright bits of metal 
glittering around their necks and in their noses and ears, 
were genuine Ethiopians in their own land. At once the 
Howadji felt a nobler, braver race. The children were 
gayer and healthier. I saw no flies feeding upon Nubian 
eyes. The Nubian houses are square and flat -roofed, and 
often palm-thatched. Grain jars stood around them, not 
unhandsomely, and mud divans built against the outer 
walls were baked by the sun into some degree of comfort 
"We paused in a group of women and children, and they 
gave us courteously to drink. Then we rode on, our route 
reeling always between the rocky hills and the rocky 
river. 

Suddenly at high noon, at the end of a tortuous rocky 
vista, and a mile or two away, stood Philae — form in form- 
lessness, measured sound in chaotic discord. For a mo- 
ment it was Greece visible — all detail was devoured by 
distance, which is enamored of general effect, and loves 



180 NILE NOTES. 



only the essential impression. It was a more wonderful 
witchery of that wild scenery, a rich revelation of forms as 
fair as Prospero could have built before Ferdinand's eyes. 
For the beauty and grace of Philse, so seen, in that stem 
and vivid contrast of form and feeling, are like the aerial 
architecture which shone substantial before the Magician's 
eyes, as imaging the glory of the world — and whose 
delicacy sang to Ferdinand, when he knew not if it were 
*' i' the air or the earth." 

Philse, so delicately drawn upon that transparent noon 
air, was an ecstasy of form. There were only architraves 
and ranges of columns among the black beetling rocks. 
It soothed the eye, for in chaos here was creation. And 
even broken columns, stately, still — ^ranging along a river, 
are as pleasant to the eye as water flowers. 



XXVIII. 

I WISH Philae were as lovely as the melody of its name 
imports. 

But I do not dare to call Isis by the name of Venus — 
or if the Palmyrene Zenobia, following the triumph of 
Aurelian, was pretty — ^then is Philse chained to the car of 
Time, lovely. Poet Eliot "Warburton, indeed, speaks of 
its " exquisite beauty." What shall the Howadji do with 
these poets ? 

* Grirdled with the shining Nile, Philse is an austere 
beauty — Isis-like, it sits solemn-browed, column crushing 
column, pylons yet erect, and whole sides of temple courts 
yet standing with perfect pillars — huge decay, wherein 
grandeur is yet grand. It is strange to see human traces 
so lovely in a spot so lonely. Strange, after the death in 
life of the Nile valley, to emerge upon life in death so 
imperial as Philae. For you remember that the Ibis did 
not pause at the temples, but beheld Thebes and Den- 
dereh, as she flew, like pictures fading on the air. 

Seen from the shore, a band of goldenest green surrounds 
the island. The steep bank is lithe with lupin and flower- 



185 NILE NOTES. 



ing weeds. Palms are tangled, as they spring, with vines 
and creepers, dragon-flies float sparkling all over it — and 
being the sole verdure in that desolation, the shores of 
Philse are gracious as blue sky after storms. A party of 
naked young Nubians rowed us over in a huge tub of a 
boat, which, with their bent boughs of trees for oars, they 
could scarcely keep against the current. They had a 
young crocodile for toy, with which they played with as 
much delight as with a kitten. The infant dragon was 
ten days old, and about a foot long. It sprawled sluggishly 
about the bottom of the boat, as its mature relatives stretch 
indolently along the sandy shores, and the boys delighted 
to push it back with a stick as it crawled feebly up the 
side. There was no special malice in it at this treatment. 
Dragon seemed to know perfectly that he was born heir to 
a breakfast upon some of his tormentors, or their near 
relatives, and that the fun would be one day quite the 
other side of his mouth, into which our young friends 
■yirust sticks and stones, not perceiving, the innocents ! 
that they were simply rehearsing their own fate. The 
Howadji wished to sacrifice it to Osiris as they stepped 
ashore upon his island, but reflected that it was a bad 
precedent to sacrifice one God to another, — and wound 
through the crimson-eyed lupin, the wild bean, and a few 
young palms that fringe the island, up to the ruins. 

The surface of the island is a mass of ruiri. But the 
great temple of Isis yet stands, although it is shattered, 
and a smaller Hypethral temple overhangs the river. It is 
not inarticulate ruin, but while whole walls and architraves 



PHIL^. I8if 



and column ranges remain, several buildings are shattered, 
and their fallen walls are blended. 

Philae was the holy island of old Egypt. Thither sailed 
processions of higher purpose, in barques more gorgeous 
than now sail the river, and deep down-gazing in the 
moonlight Nile, the Poet shall see the vanished splendor 
of a vanished race, centering solemnly here, like priestly 
pomp around an altar. Hither, bearing gifts, came kneel- 
ing Magi, before they repaired to the Bethlehem manger. 
And kings, not forgotten of fame, here unkinged them- 
selves before a kinglier. For the island was dedicate to 
Osiris, the great God of the Egyptians, who were not idol- 
aters, as far as appears, but regarded Osiris as the incar- 
nation of the goodness of the unutterable Grod of Grods. 

But it were easier for a novice to trace the temple lines 
among these ruins, than for an ordinary Howadji to evolve 
lucidity from the intricacy of the old Egyptian theology. 
And we who stroll these shores, pilgrims of beauty only, 
can not pause to lose ourselves in the darkness and ruin 
and inodorous intricacy of the labyrinth, like mere explor- 
ers of the pyramids. We know very little of the Egyptian 
theology, and that little is ill told. Had I graduated at 
Heliopolis, I would have revealed to you all. But many 
there be, who not having taken degrees at Heliopolis or 
Memphis, do yet treat of these things. Books abound 
wherewith the Howadji, in his Dahabieh on the Nile, or 
in the warm slippers at home, may befog his brain, and 
learn as much of the religious as of the political history of 
Egypt. 



184 NILE NOTES. 



What did the tenth king of the seventeenth dynasty 
for the world ? nay, why was Ramses great ? Ah, confess 
that you love to linger with Cleopatra more than with Isis, 
and adore Memnon more willingly than Amun Re ! Swart 
Cleopatra, superbly wound in Damascus silks and Persian 
shawls, going gorgeously down the Nile in a golden gon- 
dola to meet Marc Antony, had more refreshed my eyes 
than Sesostris returning victorious from the Granges. 
Ramses may have sacrificed to Isis, as Cleopatra to Ve- 
nus. But in the highest heaven all divinities are equal. 

Isis was the daughter of Time, and the wife and sister 
of Osiris. Horus was their child, and they are the Trinity 
of Philae. Osiris and Isis finally judged the dead, and were 
the best beloved Gods of the ancients, and best known of 
the moderns. Yet the devil Typhoo vanquished Osiris^ 
who lies buried in the cataract, which henceforth will be 
an emblem to the poetic Howadji of the stern struggle of 
the Good and Bad Principle. And gradually, as he medi- 
tates upon Osiris and Egypt and a race departed, one of 
the fine old fancies of the elder Egyptians will grow into 
faith with him, and he will see in the annual overflow of 
the river the annual resurrection of the good Osiris to bless 
the land. Tradition buried Osiris in the cataract, and the 
solemn Egyptian oath, was " by him who sleeps in Philse.'* 
Here was the great temple erected to his mourning widow, 
and sculptured gigantically upon the walls, the cow- 
horned, ever mild-eyed Isis, holds her Horus and deplores 
her spouse. 

Very beautiful is Isis in all Egyptian sculptures. Ten- 



PHILiE. 185 



derly tranquil her large generous features, gracious her 
full-lipped mouth, divine the dignity of her mien. In the 
groups of fierce fighters and priests, and beasts and bird- 
headed Grods that people the walls, her aspect is always 
serene and solacing — the type of the feminine principle in 
the beast and bird chaos of the world. 

The temples are of Ptolemaic times, and of course 
modern for Egypt, although traces of earlier buildings are 
still discoverable. The cartouche, or cipher of Cleopatra, 
our Cleopatra, among the many of Egypt, appears here. 
The ruins are stately and imposing, and one range of 
thirty columns yet remains. The capitals, as usual, are 
different flowers. The lotus, the acacia and others, are 
wreathed around and among them. Desaix's inscription 
is upon the wall with its republican date, and that of Pope 
Gregory XVI. — the effete upon the effete. 

The Howadji wandered among the temples. The col- 
ored ceilings, the columned courts, the rude sculptures of 
beasts and birds and flowers — rude in execution, but in 
idea very lofty — the assembling and consecration of all 
nature to the rulers of nature — ^these were grand and im- 
posing. Nor less so in their kind, the huge masses of 
stone so accurately carved, whereof the temples were 
built. For the first time, at Philae, we practically felt the 
massiveness of the Egyptian architecture. These temples 
scorn and defy time, as the immovable rocks the river. 
Yet the river and time wear them each slowly, but how 
slowly, away. We saw the singular strength of the build- 
ings and the precision of their construction by climbing 



186 NILE NOTES. 



the roof by a narrow staircase, built in the wall of the 
great temple. The staircase emerges upon the roof over 
the Adytum, or Holy of Holies, with which singular, small 
apertures communicate. Conveniences for the Grods were 
these ? Divine whispering-tubes ? Private entrances of 
the spirit ? Scuttles for Osiris and the fair Isis, or part of 
the stage-scenery of the worship, wherethrough priests 
whispered for Gods, and men were cozened by men ? 

Ah ! Yerde Giovane ! fragments of whose pleasant 
Philse breakfast are yet visible on this roof — Time loves 
his old tale and tells it forever over. Has not the Howadji 
seen in Rome the Pope, or spiritual papa of the world, sit- 
ting in a wooden kneeling figure, and playing pray under 
that very burning eye of heaven — an Italian sun of a June 
noonday? 

The Arab boys crouched in their blankets in the sun, 
upon the roof, as if it were cold, for to the Egyp- 
tian clothes are too much a luxury not to be careful- 
ly used when he has any. They smoked their pipes 
carelessly, incuriously, as if they were sculptures upon 
one wall and the Howadji upon another. Pleasant, the 
sunny loitering, with no Cicerone to disgust, lost in mild 
musing meditation, the moonlight of the mind. You will 
have the same red book or another, when you loiter, and 
thence learn the details and the long list of Ptolemies and 
Euergetes, who built and added and amended. Thence, 
too, you will learn the translations of hieroglyphics — the 
theories and speculations and other dusty stuff inseparable 
from ruins. 



PHIL^. 18Y 



You will be grave at Philae, how serenely sunny soever 
the day. But with a gravity graver than that of senti- 
ment, for it is the deadness of the death of the land that 
you will feel. The ruins will be to you the remains of the 
golden age of Egypt, for hither came Thales, Solon, Py- 
thagoras, Herodotus and Plato, and from the teachers of 
Moses learned the most mystic secrets of human thought. 
It is the faith of Philse that, developed in a thousand ways, 
claims our mental allegiance to-day — a faith transcending 
its teachers, as the sun the eyes which it enlightens. These 
wise men came — the wise men of Grreece, whose wisdom 
was Egyptian, and hither comes the mere American Ho- 
wadji and learns, but with a difference. He feels the 
greatness of a race departed. He recognizes that a man 
only differently featured from himself, lived and died here 
two thousand years ago. 

Ptolemy and his Cleopatra walked these terraces, sought 
shelter from this same sun in the shade of these same col- 
umns, dreamed over the calm river, at sunset, by moon- 
light, drained their diamond-rimmed goblet of life and 
love, then embalmed in sweet spices, were laid dreamless 
in beautiful tombs. Remembering these things, glide 
gently from Philse, for we shall see it no more. Slowly, 
slowly southward loiters the Ibis, and leaves its columned 
shores behind. Grlide gently from Philse, but it will not 
glide from you. Like a queen, crowned in death among 
her dead people, it will smile sadly through your memory 
forever. 



XXIX. 

a €xm tlmt Urn in 'Mnnu'n §>mtini ait 

Fleetly the Ibis flew. The divine days came and 
went. Unheeded the longing sunrise, the lingering 
eve. Unheeded the lonely shore of Nubia that swept, 
Sakia-singing, seaward. Unheeded the new world of Af- 
rican solitude, the great realm of Ethiopia. Unheeded the 
tropic upon which, for the first time, we really entered, 
and the pylons, columns and memorial walls that stood 
solitary in the sand. The Howadji lay ill in the blue 
cabin, and there is no beauty, no antiquity, no new world 
to an eye diseased. 

Yet illness, said a white-haired form that sat shadowy 
by his side, hath this in it, that it smooths the slope to 
death. The world is the organization of vital force, but 
when a man sickens, the substantial reality reels upon his 
brain. The cords are cut that held him to the ship that 
sails so proudly the seas, and he drifts lonely in the jolly- 
boat of his own severed existence, toward shores unknown. 
Drifts not unwillingly, as he sweeps farther away and his 
eyes are darkened. 

After acute agony, said still the white-haired shadow, 



A CROW. 189 



pausing slowly, as if he too were once alive and young, 
death is like sleep after toil. After long decay, it is as 
natural as sunset. Yet to sit rose-garlanded at the feast 
of love and beauty, yourself the lover, and the most beau- 
tiful, and hearing that you shall depart thence in a hearse, 
not in a bridal chariot, to rise smilingly and go gracefully 
away, is a rare remembrance for any man — an heroic 
death that does not often occur, nor is it to be rashly 
wished. For the heroic death is the Grods' gift to their fa- 
vorites. Who shall be presumptuous enough to claim that 
favor ? Nay, if all men were heroes, how hard it would 
be to die and leave them, for our humanity loves heroes 
more than angels and saints. It would be the discovery of 
a boundless California, and gold would be precious no more. 
The shadow was silent, and the Nubian moonlight 
crept yellow along the wall ; then, playing upon the Ho- 
wadji's heartstrings vaguely and at random, as a dream- 
ing artist touching the keys of an instrument, he pro- 
ceeded. Yet we may all know how many more the dead 
are than the living, nor be afraid to join them. Here, in 
Egypt, it is tombs which are inhabited, it is the cities 
which are deserted. The great Ramses has died, and all 
his kingdom — why not little you and I ? Nor care to lie in a 
tomb so splendid. Ours shall be a sky- vaulted Mausoleum, 
sculptured with the figaries of all life. No man of mature 
years but has more friends dead than living. His friendly 
reunion is a shadowy society. Who people for him the 
tranquil twilight and the summer dawn ? In the woods 
we knew, what forms and faces do we see ? What is the 



190 NILE NOTES. 



meaning of music, and who are its persons ? What are the 
voices of midnight, and what words slide into our minds, 
like sudden moonlight into dark chambers, and apprise us 
that we move in the vast society of all worlds and all 
times, and that if the van is lost to our eyes in the daz- 
zling dawn, and the rear disappears in the shadow of 
Night our Mother, and our comrades fall away from our 
sides — the van, and the rear, and the comrades are yet, 
and all, moving forward like the water-drops of the Amazon 
to the sea. It is not strange that when severe sickness 
comes, we are ready to die. Long buffeted by bleak, blue 
icebergs, we see at last with equanimity that we are sail- 
ing into Symmes' hole. 

The Nubian moonlight crept yellow along the- wall, 
but the monotonous speech of the white-haired mysteiy 
went sounding on, like the faint far noise of the cataract 
below Philae. 

Otherwise Nature were unkind. She smooths the slope, 
because she is ever gentle. For to turn us out of doors 
suddenly and unwillingly into the night, were worse than 
a cursing father. But Nature can never be as bad as man. 
"What boots it that Faith follows our going with a rush 
lantern, and Hope totters before with a lucifer ? Shrewd, 
sad eyes have scrutinized those lights, and whispered only, 
" It is the dancing of will-o'-the-wisps among the tombs." 
It is only the gift of Nature that we die well, as that we 
are born well. It is Nature that unawes death to us, and 
makes it welcome and pleasant as sleep. 
A mystery ! 



A CROW. 191 



But if you say that it is the dim dream of the future, 
wrought into the reality of faith, that smooths death — ^then 
that dream and faith are the devices of nature, like these en- 
ticing sculptures upon tomb avenues, to lead us gently 
down. For I find that all men are cheered by this dream, 
although its figures are as the men. There are gardens 
and houris, or hunting-grounds and exhaustless deer, or 
crystal cities where white-robed pilgrims sing hymns 
forever, — (howbeit after Egypt no philosophic Howadji 
will hold that long white garments are of heaven.) 

The flickering form waved a moment in the moonlight 
and resumed. 

Heaven is a hint of Nature, and therein shall we feel 
how ever kind she is — opening the door of death into 
golden gloom, she points to the star that gilds it. She does 
this to all men, and in a thousand ways. But in all lands 
are seers who would monopolize the seeing — Bunyan pilots, 
sure you ^vill ground in the gloom except you embark in 
their ship, and with their treatise of navigation. Mean- 
while the earth has more years than are yet computed, 
and the Bunyan pilots are of the threescore and ten 
species. 

Priests and physicians agree, that at last all men die 
bravely, and we are glad to listen. Howadji, that bravery 
was ours. "We should be as brave as the hundred of any 
chance crowd, and so indirectly we know how we should 
die, even if, at some time. Death has not looked closely 
at us over the shoulder, and said audibly what we knew — 
that he held the fee simple of our existence. 



192 NILE NOTES, 



The Nubian moonlight waned along the wall. We 
praise our progress, said the white-haired shadow, yet 
know no more than these Egyptians knew. We say that 
we feel we are happier, and that the many are wiser and 
better, simply because we are alive, and they are mummies, 
and life is warmer than death. The seeds of the world 
were sown along these shores. There is none lovelier than 
Helen, nor wiser than Plato, nor better than Jesus. They 
were children of the sun, and of an antiquity that already 
fades and glimmers upon our eyes. 

Venus is still the type of beauty — our philosophy is 
diluted Platonism — our religion is an imitation of Christ. 
The forms of our furniture are delicately designed upon 
the walls of Theban tombs. Thales after his return from 
Egypt determined the sun's orbit, and gave us our year. 
Severe study detects in Egyptian sculptures emblems of 
our knowledge and our skill. Have you, Howadji, new 
ideas, or only different developments of the old ones ? As 
the Ibis bears you southward, are you proud and com- 
passionate of your elders and your masters — or do you feel 
simply that the earth is round, and that if in temperate 
regions the homely lark soars and sings, in the tropics 
the sumptuous plumage of silent birds is the glittering 
translation of that song ? 

Have you mastered the mystery of death — ^have you 
even guessed its meaning ? Are Mount Auburn and Grreen- 
wood truer teachers than the Theban tombs? Nature 
adorns death. Even sets in smiles, the face that shall 
smile no more. But you group around it hideous associa- 



A CROW. 193 



tions, and of the pale phantom make an appalling appari- 
tion. Broken columns — inverted torches — weeping angels 
and willows are within the gates upon which you write, 
*' Whoso belie veth in me shall never die." Blackness and 
knolling bells, weepers and hopeless scraps of Scripture, 
these are the heavy stones that we roll against the sepul- 
chers in which lie those whom you have baptized in his 
name, who came to abolish death. 

"Why should not you conspire with Nature to keep 
death beautiful, nor dare, when the soul has soared, to dis- 
honor by the emblems of decay the temple it has con- 
secrated and honored. Lay it reverently, and pleasantly 
accompanied, in the earth, and there leave it forever, nor 
know of skulls or cross-bones. Nor shall willows weep for 
a tree that is greener — nor a broken column symbolize a 
work completed — nor inverted flame a pure fire ascending. 
Better than all, burn it with incense at morning — so shall 
the mortal ending be not unworthy the soul, nor without 
significance of the souPs condition. Tears, like smiles, are 
of nature, and will not be repressed. They are sacred, and 
should fall with flowers upon the dead. But forgetting 
graveyards and cemeteries, how silent and solemn soever, 
treasure the dearest dust in sacred urns, so holding in your 
homes forever those who have not forfeited, by death, the 
rights of home. 

The wan, white-haired shadow wasted in the yellow 
moonlight. 

But all illness is not unto death. Much is rather like 
dark, stony caves of meditation by the wayside of life. 

I 



194 NILE NOT^S. 



There is no carousing there, no Kushuk Arnem and 
Ghawazee dancing, but pains as of corded hermits and 
starving ascetics. Yet the hermit has dreams that the 
king envies. Yf e come thousands of miles to see strange 
lands, wonderful cities, and haunts of fame. But in 
a week's illness in the blue cabin or elsewhere, cities of 
more shining towers and ponderous palace-ranges, lands of 
more wondrous growth and races than ever Cook or Co- 
lumbus discovered, or the wildest dreamer dreamed, dawn 
and die along the brain. To those golden gates and 
shores sublime no palmy Nile conducts— not even the Eu- 
phrates or Tigris, nor any thousands of miles, would bring 
the traveler to that sight. Sick Sinbad, traveling only 
from one side of his bed to the other, could have told' tales 
stranger and more fascinating than enchanted his gaping 
guests. 

Ah! could we tame the fantastic genius that only 
visits us with fever for the entertainment of our health, 
we could well spare the descriptive poets, nor read Yathek 
and Hafiz any more. But he is untamable, until his 
brother of sleep, that good genius who gives us dreams, 
will consent to serve our waking-^until stars shine at noon- 
day — until palms wave along the Hudson shores. 



XXX. 

The Nubians devote themselves to nudity and to 
smearing their hair with castor oil. 

At least it seems so from the river. Nor have they 
much chance to do any thing else, for Nubia only exists 
by the grace of the desert or the persistence of the Nile in 
well-doing. It is a narrow strip of green between the 
mountains on both sides, and the river. Often it is only 
the mere slope of the bank which is green. You ascend 
through that, pushing aside the flowering lupin and beans, 
and stand at the top of the bank in the desert. Often the 
desert stretches to the stream, and defies it, shoring it 
with sheer sand. A few taxed palms, a few taxed Sakias, 
the ever neat little houses, the comely black race, and, 
walling all, the inexorable mountains, rocky, jagged, of 
volcanic outline and appearance — these are the few fig- 
ures of the Nubian panorama. 

Dates, baskets, mats, the gum and charcoal of the 
mimosa, a little senna, and farther south ebony, sandal- 
wood, rice, sugar, and slaves, are all the articles of com- 
merce — lupins, beans, and dhourra, a kind of grain, the 
crops of consumption. 



196 NILE NOTES. 



It is a lonely, solitary land. There are no flights of 
birds, as in Egypt ; no wide valley reaches, greened with 
golden plenty. Scarce a sail whitens the yellow-blue of 
the river. A few solitary camels and donkeys pass, spec- 
tral, upon the shore. It seems stiller than Egypt, where 
the extent of the crops, the frequent villages and constant 
population, relieve the sense of death. In Nubia, it is the 
silence of intense suspense. The unyielding mountains 
range along so near the river, that the Howadji fears the 
final triumph of the desert. 

Like a line of fortresses stretched against the foe, stand 
the Sakias, the allies of the river. But their ceaseless 
sigh, as in Egypt, only saddens the silence. Through the 
great gate of the cataract, you enter a new world, south 
of the Poet's *' farthest south." A sad, solitary, sunny 
world — but bravery and the manly virtues are always 
the dower of poor races, who must roughly rough it to 
exist. 

In appearance and character the Nubians are the superi- 
ors of the Egyptians. But they are subject tathem by the 
inscrutable law that submits the darker races to the whiter, 
the world over. The sweetness and placidity and fidelity, 
the love of country and family, the simplicity of character 
and conduct which distinguish them, are not the imperial 
powers of a people. Like the Savoyards into Europe, the 
Nubians go down into Egypt and fill inferior offices of 
trust. They are the most valued of servants, but never 
lose their home — longing and return into the strange, sultry 
silence of Nubia, when they have been successful in Egypt. 



SOUTHWARD. 197 



Yet the antique Ethiopian valor survives. Divers dis- 
tricts are still warlike, and the most savage struggles are 
not unknown. The Ethiopians once resisted the Romans, 
and the fame of one-eyed Queen Candace, whose wisdom 
and valor gave the name to her successors, yet flourishes 
in the land, and the remains of grand temples attest that 
the great Ramses and the proud Ptolemies thought it 
worth while to own it. The Nubians bear arms, but all 
of the rudest kind — crooked knives, iron-shod clubs, and 
slings and a shield of hippopotamus hide — and in the bat- 
tles the women mingle and assist. 

Yet in the five hundred miles from Syene to Dongola, 
not more than one hundred thousand inhabitants are esti- 
mated. They reckon seven hundred Sakias for that dis- 
tance, and that each is equal to one thousand five hundred 
bushels of grain. 

These shores are the very confines of civilization. The 
hum of the world has died away into stillness. The sua 
shines brightly in Nubia. The sky is blue, but the sad- 
ness of the land rests like a shadow upon the Howadji. It 
is like civilization dying decently. The few huts and the 
few people smile and look contented. They come down to 
the shore, as the Ibis skims along, wonderingly and trust- 
fully as the soft-souled Southern savages beheld with curi- 
osity Columbus' fleet. They are naked and carry clubs, 
and beg powder and arms, but sit quietly by your side as 
you sketch or sit upon the shore, or run like hunting-dogs 
for the pigeons you have shot. If there be any impossible 
shot, the Howadji is called upon with perfect confidence 



198 NILE NOTES, 



to execute it— for a clothed Howadji with a gun is a den- 
izen of a loftier sphere to the nude Nubians. "Why does 
the sun so spoil its children and fondle their souls away ? 
How neat are their homes, like houses set in order ! Foi 
the mighty desert frowns behind, and the crushing govern- 
ment frowns below. Yet the placid Nubian looks from his 
taxed Sakia to his taxed palms, sees the sand and the tax- 
gatherer stealing upon his substance, and quietly smiles, 
as if his land were a lush-vineyarded Rhine-bank. 

The Howadji had left the little, feline Eeis at Syene, 
his home, for the indolent Nubian blood was mingled in 
his veins, and made him seem always this quiet land per- 
sonified. The Ibis flew, piloted by a native Nubian, who 
knew the river through his country. For here the shores 
are stony, and there are two difficult passages, which th« 
natives call half-cataracts. 

Hassan was a bright-eyed, quiet personage, who dis- 
charged his functions very humbly, sitting with the An- 
cient Mariner at the helm, who seemed, grisly Egyptian, 
half jealous of his Nubian colleague, and contemptuously 
remarked, when we reached Philse, returning, that no 
man need go twice to know the river. The men were un- 
easy at the absence of their head, nor liked to be directed 
by the Nubian, or the Ancient Mariner ; but Hassan sang 
with them such scraps of Arabic song as he knew, and re- 
galed them with pure Nubian melodies, which are sweeter 
than those of Egypt, for the Nubians are much more mu- 
sical than their neighbors, and in a crew, they are the best 
and most exhilarating singers. He sat patiently on the 



SOUTHWARD. 199 



prow for hours, watching the river, calling at times to 
G-risly to turn this way and that, and Hassan was uniform- 
ly genial and gentle, pulling an occasional oar, returning. 

For the rest, lie was clothed in coarse, white cotton, 
haunted the kitchen after dinner, and fared sumptuously 
every day. Then begged tobacco of the Howadji, and 
smoked it as serenely as if it were decently gotten. 

At Kalabsheh we passed the Tropic of Cancer. 

But are not the Tropics the synonym of Paradise ? The 
tropics, mused the Howadji, and instantly imagination was 
entangled in an Indian jungle, and there struggled, fettered 
in glorious foliage, mistaking the stripes and eyes of a 
royal Bengal tiger, for the most gorgeous of tropical flow- 
ers. But escaping thence, imagination fluttered and fell, 
and a panorama of stony hills, a cloudless, luminous sky, 
but bare in brilliance, enlivened by no clouds, by no far- 
darting troops of birds — a narrow strip of green shore — 
silence, solitude and sadness revealed to the Howadji the 
dream-land of the tropics. 

Yet there was a sunny spell in that land and scenery 
which held me then, and holds charmed my memory now. 
It was a sleep — we seemed to live it and breathe it, as the 
sun in Egypt. There was luminous languor in the air, as 
from opiate floAvers, yet with only their slumber, and none 
of their fragrance. It seemed a failure of creation, or a cre- 
ation not yet completed. Nature slept and dreamed over 
her work, and whoso saw her sleep, dreamed vaguely her 
dreams. 

Puck-piloted and girdling the earth in an hour, would 



100 NILE NOTES. 



not the Howadji feel that only a minute's journey of 
that hour was through the ripe maturity of creation — 
the rest, embryo — half conceived or hopeless ? ^' The 
world" is only the fine focus of all the life of the world at 
any period ; but, Grunning in blue spectacles, picking 
gingerbread nuts off the Dom palm, how small is that 
focus ! 

One Nubian day only was truly tropical. It was near 
Derr, the chief town, and the azure calm and brilliance of 
the atmosphere forced imagination to grow glorious gardens 
upon the shores, and to crown with forests, vine-waving, 
bloom-brilliant, the mountains, desert no longer, but divine 
as the vision-seen hill of prophets ; and to lead triumphal 
trains of white elephants, bearing the forms and costumes 
of Eastern romance, and giraffes, and the priestly pomp of 
India, through the groves of many-natured palms that 
fringed the foreground of the picture. It was summer and 
sunshine — a very lotus day. 

I felt the warm breath of the morning streaming over 
the Ibis, like radiance from opening eyes, even before the 
lids of the dav/n were lifted. Then came the sun over 
the Arabian mountains, and the waves danced daintily in 
the rosy air, and the shores sloped serenely, and the river 
sang and gurgled against the prow, whereon sat the white- 
turbaned, happy Hassan, placidly smoking, and self-in- 
volved, as if he heard all the white Nile secrets, and those 
of the Mountains of the Moon. The Ibis spread her white 
wings to the warm wooing wind, and ran over the water. 
Was she not well called Ibis, with her long, sharp wings, 



SOUTHWARD. 201 



loved of the breeze, that toys with them as she flies and 
fills them to fullness with speed ? 

The sky was cloudless and burningly rosy. To what 
devote the delicious day ? What dream so dear, what book 
so choice, that it would satisfy the spell? Luxury of 
doubt and long delay ! Such wonder itself was luxury — 
it rippled the mind with excitement, delicately as the 
wind kissed the stream into wavelets. Yet the Howadji 
looked along the shelves and the book was found, and in 
the hot heart of noon he had drifted far into the dreamy 
depths of Herman Melville's Mardi. Lost in the rich ro- 
mance of Pacific reverie, he felt all around him the radiant 
rustling of Yillah's hair, but could not own that Poly- 
nesian peace was profounder than his own Nubian si- 
lence. 

Mardi is unrhymed poetry, but rhythmical and meas- 
ured. Of a low, lapping cadence is the swell of those sen- 
tences, like the dip of the sun-stilled. Pacific waves. In 
more serious moods, they have the grave music of Bacon's 
Essays. Yet who but an American could have written 
them ? And essentially American are they, although not 
singing Niagara or the Indians. 

Romance or reality, asked, dazed in doubt, bewildered 
Broadway and approving Pall Mall. Both, erudite metro- 
politans, and you, ye of the warm slippers. The Ho- 
wadji is no seaman, yet can he dream the possible dreams 
of the mariner in the main-top of the becalmed or trade- 
wind-wafted Pacific whaler. In those musings, mingles 
rare reality, though it be romantically edged, as those 



202 



NILE NOTES, 



palms of Ibreem, seen through the glass, are framed in 
wondrous gold and purple — 

On, on, deeper into the Pacific calm, farther into that 
Southern spell ! The day was divine — the hush, the dazzle, 
the supremacy of light, were the atmosphere of the tropics, 
and if toward evening, and for days after, the anxious North 
blustered in after her children, she could never steal that 
day from their memories. The apple was bitten. The 
Howadji had tasted the Equator. 



XXXI. 

Eltinia fjjtiU. 

We sought the South no longer. Far flown already 
into a silent land, the Ibis finally furled her wings at Aboo 
Simbel. But far and ever farther southward, over the 
still river-reaches, pressed piercing thought, nor paused at 
Khartoum wdiere the Nile divides, nor lingered until lost, 
in the Mountains of the Moon. Are they sarcastically 
named, those mountains, or prophetically, that when they 
are explored, the real moon ranges shall be determined ? 

Up through the ruins of the eldest land and the eldest 
race came two children of the youngest, and stood gazing 
southward into silence. Southward into the childishness 
of races forever in their dotage or never to grow — toward 
the Dinkas and the shores loved of the lotus, where they 
worship trees, and pull out the incisors for beauty, and 
where a three-legged stool is a King's throne. 

The South ! our synonym of love, beauty and a wide 
world unrealized. Lotus fragrance blows outward from 
that name, and steeps us in blissful dreams that bubble 
audibly in song from poets' lips. It is the realm of faery- 
fantasy and perfected passion. Dark, deep eyes gushing 



204 NILE NOTES. 



radiance in rapt summer noons, are the South, visible and 
bewildering to the imagination of the North. Whoso sails 
southward is a happy Mariner, and we fancy his ship 
gliding forever across tranced sapphire seas, reeking with 
rarest odors, steeped in sunshine and silence, wafted by 
winds that faint with sweet and balm against the silken 
sails, for the South has no wood for us but sandal and 
ebony and cedar, and no stuffs but silks and cloth of gold. 
Sumptuous is the South — a Syren singing us ever 
forward to a bliss never reached ; but with each mile won 
she makes the pursuit more passionate, brimming the cup 
that only feeds the thirst, with delicious draughts that taste 
divine. Then some love-drunken poet beholds her as a 
person, and bursts into song — 

" I muse, as in a trance, whene'er 

The languors of thy love-deep eyea 
Float on to me. I would I were 

So tranced, so rapt in ecstasies — 
To stand apart and to adore, 
Gazing on thee for evermore — 
Serene, imperial Eleanore." 

The morning was bright when the Ibis stopped at Aboo 
Simbel. Nero presently arrived, and the blue pennant 
passed, flying forward to Wady Haifa and the second 
cataract. After a brief delay and a pleasant call, Nero 
stretched into the stream, and the Italian tricolor floated 
off southward, and disappeared. The Ibis was left alone at 
the shore. Over it rose abruptly a bold picturesque rock 



ULTIMA THULE. 205 



which, of all the two hundred miles between the cataracts, 
is the natural site for a rock temple. 

A grand goal is Aboo Simbel for the long Nile voyage, 
and the more striking that it is approached from Cairo, 
through long ranges of white plaster mosques, and mina- 
rets, and square mud pigeon houses — the highest architec- 
tural attempt of modern Egyptian genius on the Nile. 
The Howadji is ushered by dwarfs into the presence of a 
G-od. The long four weeks' flight of the Ibis through such 
a race and works to this temple goal, is the sad, severe 
criticism of Time upon himself and his own changes. 
For although Time is wise, and buries, where he can, his 
past from his future, yet here is something mightier than 
he ; and the azure of the sky which he can not tarnish, 
preserves the valorous deeds of his youth freshly and fair 
to his unwilling age. Vainly he strives to bury the proofs 
and works of his early genius — vainly in remote Nubia he 
calls upon the desert to hide them, that young England 
and young America may flatter their fond conceits, that 
now for the first time man fairly lives, and human genius 
plays. Some wandering Belzoni thwarts his plans — foils 
the desert, and on the first of August, 1817, with Mr. 
Beechy, and captains Irby and Mangles, pushes his w^ay 
into "the finest and most extensive excavation in Nu- 
bia" — thinks it '' very large" at first, and gradually his 
" astonishment increased," as he finds it to be " one of the 
most magnificent of temples, enriched with beautiful in- 
taglios — painting — colossal figures, &c." which &o. is 
precisely the inexpressible grandeur of Aboo Simbel. For 



206 NILE NOTES. 



who has not flown up the Nile, must begin his travels 
again, if he would behold ruins. Standing at Aboo Simbel, 
and looking southward, Grreece and Rome are toys of 
yesterday, and vapors wreathing , away. When once the 
Egyptian temples are seen, they alone occupy the land, 
and suggest their own priests and people. The hovels of 
the present race are as ant-hills at their gates. Their 
prominency and importance can not be conceived from 
the value and interest of other ruins. Here at Aboo Simbel 
the Howadji, after potential potations and much medita- 
tion, is inclined to bless the desert — for he feels that in 
Egypt it is the ally of art, and the friend of modern times. 
The Howadji entered now upon a course of temples. 
The Ibis pointed her prow northward, and sight-seeing 
commenced. Yet on these pages remains slight detail of 
what she saw as she threaded, homeward, that wonderful 
wilderness of ruin. Not a diary of details, but slightest 
sketches of impression, were found at Cairo under her 
wing. 

This day at Aboo Simbel, while the first officer, Seyd, 
superintended the taking down of the masts and sails and 
the arrangement of the huge oars — for we were to float and 
row northward, when the wind would allow — and while the 
Hadji Hamed and his kitchen were removed to the ex- 
treme prow, to make room for the rowers on the middle 
deck, the Howadji climbed the steep sand-bank to the 
temples of Aboo Simbel. 

The smaller one is nearest the river, and is an excavation 
in the solid rock, with six sculptured figures on the facade. 



ULTIMA THULE. 201 

Two of these are Athor, the Egyptian Venus, to whom the 
temple was consecrate. She had beautiful names, and of 
delicate significance, as the Lady of the "West, because she 
received the setting sun — the Night, not primeval darkness, 
but the mellow tropical night, breathing coolness and balm. 
Athor's emblems are so like those of Isis, that the two deities 
are often confounded. She was the later Aphrodite of the 
Greeks, to whom they built the Dendereh temple ; and, 
like Isis, is cow-horned and mild-eyed, with a disk be- 
tween the horns. Athor was a gracious and gentle Grod- 
dess, and properly was her temple encountered here, far 
in the gracious and gentle South, whose sweetness and 
languor were personified in the tender tranquillity of her 
mien. 

But beyond and higher, is the great temple of Aboo 
Simbel, in front of which sit four Colossi, figures of Ram- 
ses the Grreat. Their grandeur and beauty are beyond ex- 
pression, and the delight in their lofty character of beauty 
quite consumes the natural wonder at their uninjured du- 
ration for twenty or thirty centuries. Yet in Egypt, the 
mind gradually acquires a sense of permanence in the 
forms that meet the eye. Permanence is the spirit of the 
climate, and of the simplicity of the landscape, and of the 
supreme silence. What is built at the present time, is 
evidently so transitory in its construction and character, 
yet lasts so long, that the reasons of the fact of duration 
are clear to your mind before wonder is awakened. The 
dry warm air is the spell, and as it feeds your lungs and 
life, it breathes into your mind its most significant secrets. 



208 NILE NOTES, 



In these faces of Ramses, seven feet long, is a Grodlike 
grandeur and beauty, which the Greeks never reached. 
They are not only colossal blocks of stone, but the mind 
can not escape the feeling that they were conceived by co- 
lossal minds. Such only cherish the idea of repose so pro- 
found, for there is no type or standard in nature for works 
like these, except the comparative character of the real 
expression of real heroes, and more than heroes. If a poet 
should enter in dreams the sacred groves of the grand- 
est mythology, these are the forms he would expect to see, 
breathing grandeur and godly grace. They sit facing the 
south-east, and as if necessarily expectant of the world's 
homage. There is a sweetness beyond smiling in the 
rounded, placid mouth. The nose is arched, the almond- 
eye voluptuously lidded as the lips are rounded, and the 
stillness of their beauty is steeped in a placid passion, that 
seems passionlessness, and which was necessarily insepara- 
ble from the works of Southern artists. It is a new type 
of beauty, not recalling or suggesting any other. It is 
alone in sculpture, serene and Godlike. Greek Jupiter is 
grand and terrible, but human. The Jupiter of any 
statue, even the Tonans or the Olympian, might have 
showered in gold upon Danae, or folded lo in the embra- 
cing cloud, or have toyed with fond, foolish Semele till his 
fire consumed her. The G-reek G-ods are human. But 
these elder figures are above humanity— they dwell se- 
renely in abstract perfection. 

In their mystic beauty all this appears. And the 
American Howadji wonders to find this superhuman char- 



ULTIMA THULE. 209 

aoter projected into such expression. The face of one of 
these Aboo Simbel figures teaches more of elder Egypt 
than any hieroglyphed history which any Old Mortality 
may dig out, in the same way that the literature of Greece 
and the character of Grreek art reveal the point of develop- 
ment reached by the Grreek nature, which, standing as a 
world-student at Aboo Simbel, is the point of interest to 
the Howadji. Strangely they sit there, and have sat, the 
beautiful bloom of eternal youth and the beautiful balance 
of serene wisdom in their faces, with no trace there of the 
possibility of human emotion ; and so they sit and benignly 
smile through the Howadji's mind forever, as the most tri- 
umphant realization in art of the abstract perfection of 
conscious being. 

After which consolatory conclusion, that, with the re- 
sounding tongues of the figures, the Howadji would be 
glad to thunder chorally to the world, he descends the 
sand-slope into the interior of the temple, for the sand has 
so filled it, that although the entrance is some thirty feet 
high, he must stoop to enter. The day was waning, and 
the great hall was dark. The present Howadji was yet 
weak with the illness which the white-haired phantom 
watched, and remained with Congo upon the sand-slope, 
looking into the temple, as the light wood was kindled in a 
portable crate, to illuminate the interior. But the Pacha 
penetrated two hundred feet to the Adytum. He passed 
the Osiride columns, which are a grand feature of the 
early temples, being statues with placid features and arms 
folded upon their breast, cut upon the face of square pil- 



210 NILE NOTES. 



lars, and reached the four sitting figures in the Adytum — 
a separate interior niche and holy of holies, figures of the 
Grods to ^whom the temple was dedicate. Chiefly Aboo 
Simbel was dedicate to Ra, the sun, also to Kneph, Osiris, 
and Isis, by Ramses the G-reat. Upon all the walls are 
sculptures of his victories, his offerings to the Grods, and 
religious rites. These walls are blackened now by smoke, 
and each fresh party of Howadji, with its fresh portable 
crate of light wood, can not avoid smoking its share of the 
temple. 

The sun was setting as the Howadji emerged, and 
looked their last upon the placid Gods, whose grace 
made the twilight tender. They slid slowly down the sand 
to the shore, and reached the poor, dismantled Ibis. -Fleet, 
fair Ibis no longer — the masts were down and were stretch- 
ed over the deck, like ridgepoles for an awning, and the 
smoke of Kara Kooseh ascended from the prow, and the 
sharp, lithe yards pierced the blue no more. The glory 
was gone, and the beauty. It was an Ibis no longer, but 
a " loggy old Junk, a lumpish Gfundelow," said the sen- 
tentious Pacha. 

The golden-sleeved Commander received us, taking 
credit for all that had been done ; and as the stars tri- 
umphed over the brief twilight, the crew, with a slow, 
mournful song, pushed away from the shore and we headed 
southward no longer. There was a, sadness in that star- 
light beyond any other upon the Nile. The Howadji had 
reached their southest south, and the charm of exploration 
was over. Return is always sad, for return is unnatural 



ULTIMA THULE. 211 



Ever forward, ever farther, is the law of life, and the out- 
ward seems not to keep pace with the inward, even if it 
does not seem to, dwarf and defraud it, when we return to 
the same places and the old pursuits. As the South re- 
cceded in the starlight, that silent evening, a duty and a 
right seemed to be slipping away — the Howadji were turn- 
ing the farthest point of dreaming, their Cape of Grood 
Hope, beyond which slept their Indian seas, and drifted 
again with the mystic stream slowly out of the Past to- 
ward the insatiable Future. 

The moon rose and hung golden over Arabia, as the 
sad, monotonous song of the crew trembled and died away, 
and with the slow, measured throb of oars, the Howadji's 
hearts beat homeward. 



XXXII. 

We floated and rowed slowly down the river. When 
the wind blew violently the crew did not row at all, and 
we took our chance at floating, spinning round upon the 
river, and drifting from shore to shore. When it swelled 
to a gale, we drew in under the bank and allowed its fury 
to pass. Once, for two days it held us fast, and the irate 
Howadji could do nothing but await the pleasure of a lull. 
But the gale outlasted their patience. They had explored 
all the neighboring shore, had seen the women with glass 
beads, and necklaces, and black woolen garments, and 
crisp woolly hair. They had sat upon the mud seats of the 
houses, and had been the idols of popular attention and ad- 
miration. But the wind would not blow away, and the 
too happy crew stretched upon the bank, and shielded by 
it, slept and chatted all day long. The third day, the 
gale still blew, though feebly, and orders for tracking were 
issued from the blue cabin. There was great reluctance, 
for it is hard work to pull a Junk or Grundelow against a 
wind. A.nd as the supple-limbed, smooth-skinr^d Moham- 
mad, one of the best workers of the crew, undertook, stand- 



NORTHWARD. 213 



ing on the shore among the rest, who did not dare to 
speak, to expostulate and complain ; the Pacha, in a royal 
rage, was about springing upon him for tremendous chas- 
tisement, when Mohammad, warned by his fellows, sprang 
up the bank and disappeared. The rest, appalled and 
abashed, seized the rope and went to work. We tracked 
but a few miles that day, however, for it was too heavy 
work. 

The wind died at last, but it was never as peaceable 
as it should have been. For although the hopeful, ascend- 
ing Howadji hears that with January or February the soft 
southern gales begin to blow, and will waft him as gently 
northward as the north winds blew him south, he finds 
that those southern gales blow only in poetry, or poetic 
memory. 

In the calmer pauses, however, we tracked, and rowed, 
and drifted to Dekkar, and a yellow, vaporous moon led 
us to the temple. Seyd accompanied the Howadji with 
the portable crate, wherewith they were to do their share 
of smoking the remains. All Nubia was asleep in the yel- 
low moonlight, and the inhabitants of Dekkar rushed forth 
from their huts as we passed along, the huge Seyd pre- 
ceding, bearing the crate like a trophy, and snarling at 
all curs that shivered the hushed silence with their shrieks. 
Doubtless, as we approached the temple, and the glare of 
our torches flashed through its darkness, meditative jackals 
and other beasts of prey withdrew to the more friendly 
dark of distance. And then, if ever, standing in the bright 
moonlight among Egyptian ruins, the apostrophes and 



214 NILE NOTES, 



sentimentalities and extravagancies of Volney and his 
brood, flap duskily through the mind like birds of omen ill. 
There is something essentially cheerful, however, in 
an Egyptian ruin. It stands so boldly bare in the sun and 
moon, its forms are so massive and precise, its sculptures 
so simply outlined, and of such, serene objectivity of ex- 
pression, and time deals so gently with the ruin's self, as 
if reluctant through love or fear to obliterate it, or even to 
hang it with flowery weepers and green mosses, that your 
feeling shares the freshness of the ruin, and you reserve 
for the Coliseum or the Parthenon that luxury of soft senti- 
ment, of which Childe Harold's apostrophe to Rome is the 
excellent expression. We must add to this, too, the entire 
separation from our sympathy, of the people and principles 
that originated these structures. The Romans are our 
friends and neighbors in time, for they lived only yester- 
day. History sees clearly to the other side of Rome, and 
beholds the campagna and the mountains, before the wolf 
was whelped, that mothered a world. But along these 
shores history sees not much more than we can see. It 
can not look within the hundred, gates of Thebes, and bab- 
bles very inarticulately about what it professes to know. 
We have a vague feeling that this was the eldest born of 
Time — certainly his most accomplished and wisest child, 
and that the best of our knowledge, is a flower ofl* that 
trunk. But that is not enough to bring us near to it. The 
Colossi sit speechless, but do not look as if they would 
speak our language, even were their tongues loosed. 
Theirs is another beauty, another feeling than ours, and 



NORTHWARD. 216 



except to passionless study and universal cosmopolitan 
interest, Egypt has only the magnetism of mystery for us, 
until the later days of its decline. 

Our human interest enters Egypt with Alexander the 
G-reat, and the Grreeks, and becomes vivid and redly 
warm with the Romans and Cleopatra, with Csesar and 
Marc Antony, with Hadrian and Antinous. The rest are 
phantoms and specters that haunt the shores. Therefore 
there are two interests and two kinds of remains in Egypt, 
the Pharaohnic and the Ptolemaic — the former represents 
the eldest, and the latter the youngest, history of the land. 
The elder is the genuine old Egyptian interest, the young- 
er the G-reco- Egyptian — after the conquest — after the 
glorious son had returned to engraft his own develop- 
ment upon the glorious sire. It was the tree in flower, 
transplanted. No Howadji denies that the seed was 
Egyptian, but poet Martineau perpetually reviles the 
GreeJcs for their audacity in coming to Egypt, can with 
difficulty contain her dissatisfaction at pausing to see the 
Ptolemaic remains, finds that word sufficient description 
and condemnation. But the Greeks, notwithstanding, rarely 
spoiled any thing they touched, and here in Egypt, they 
inoculated massiveness with grace, and grandeur with 
beauty. Of course there was always something lost. An 
Egyptian temple built by Greek-taught natives, or by 
G-reeks who wished to compromise a thousand jealousies 
and prejudices, must, like all other architecture, be ent- 
blematical of the spirit of the time and of the people. Yet 
in gaining grace, the Howadji is not disposed to think that 



216 NILE NOTES, 



Egyptian architecture lost much of its grandeur. The 
rock temples, or the eldest Egyptian remains, have all the 
imposing interest of the might and character of primitive 
races grandly developing in art. But as the art advances 
to separate structures and slowly casts away a crust of 
crudities, although it may lose in solid weight, it gains in 
every other way. 

Then the perfection of any art is always unobtrusive. 
Yes, in a sense, unimpressive, as the most exquisite of sum- 
mer days, so breathes balm into a vigorous and healthy 
body, that the individual exists without corporeal con- 
sciousness, yet is then most corporeally perfect. In the 
same way disproportion arrests the attention. Beauti- 
ful balance, which is the character of perfection in art or 
human character or nature, allows no prominent points. 
Washington is undoubtedly always underrated in our judg- 
ments, because he was so well proportioned ; and the finest 
musical performance has such natural ease and quiet, and 
the colors and treatment of a fine picture such propriety 
and harmony, that we do not at once know how fine it is. 
It is the cutting of a razor so sharply edged that we are 
not conscious of it. "We have all seen the same thing in 
beautiful faces. The most permanent and profound beauty 
did not thrill us, but presently, like air to the lungs, it was 
a necessity of inner life, while the striking beauty is gen- 
erally a disproportion, and so far, a monstrosity and fault. 
Men who feel beauty most profoundly, are often unable to 
recall the color of eyes and hair, unless, as with artists, 
there is an involuntary technical attention to those points. 



NORTHWARD. 217 



For beauty is a radiance that can not be analyzed, and 
which is not described when you call it rosy. Wanting any 
word which shall express it, is not the highest beauty the 
synonym of balance, for the highest thought is Grod, and 
he is passionlessly balanced in our conception. 

This is singularly true in architecture. The Grreek 
nature was the most purely proportioned of any that we 
know — and this beautiful balance breathes its character 
through all Grreek art. The Grreeks were as much the 
masters of their world, physically, and infinitely more, 
intellectually, than the Romans were of theirs. And it is 
suspected that the Grreek element blending with the Saxon, 
makes us the men we are. Yet the single Roman always 
appears in our imaginations as stronger, because more 
stalwart, than the Grreek — and the elder Egyptian archi- 
tecture seems grander, because heavier than the Grrecian. 
It is a kind of material deception — the triumph of gross 
sense. It is the old story of Richard and Salah-ed-deen. 

The grace of the Grreek character, both humanly and 
artistically, was not a want of strength, but it was ex- 
quisite balance. Grrace in character, as in movement, is 
the last delicate flower, the most bloomy bloom. The 
grandeur of mountain outlines — ^their poetic sentiment — 
the exquisite hues that flush along their sides, are not 
truly known until you have so related them to the whole 
landscape, by separating yourself from them, that this 
balance can appear. While you climb the mountain, and 
behold one detail swift swallowing another — ^though the 
abysses are grand, and the dead trunks titanic, and the 

K 



218 NILE NOTES. 



single flower exquisite, yet the mass has no form and no 
hue, and only the details have character. 

Beauty is reached in the same way in art. If parts are 
exaggerated, striking impressions may be produced, but 
the best beauty is lost. The early Egyptian architecture 
is exaggeratedly heavy. The whole art, in its feeling and 
form, seems to symbolize foundation — as if it were to bear 
all the finer and farther architectures of the world upon 
itself It is massive and heavy and permanent, but not 
graceful. The beholder brings away this ponderous im- 
pression — nothing seems massive to him after Egypt, as 
nothing seems clean after a Shaker village, and if upon the 
shore something lighter and more graceful arrest his eye, 
he is sure that it is a decadence of art. For so impressively 
put is this massiveness of structure, that it seems the 
only rule, and he will hear of no others — as a man return- 
ing from a discourse of one idea, eloquently and fervidly 
set forth, believes in that, mainly, until he hears another 
fervid argument. 

But the Grreeks achieved something loftier. They 
harmonized strength into beauty, and therein secured the 
highest success of art — ^the beautifying of use. Nothing in 
nature is purely ornamental, and therefore nothing in art 
has a right to be. Grreek architecture sacrifices none of 
the strength of the Egyptian, if we may trust the most 
careful and accurate engravings, but elevates it. It is 
the proper superstructure of that foundation. It is aerial 
and light and delicate. Probably, on the whole, a Greek 
temple charms the eye more than any other single object 



NORTHWARD. 219 



of art. It is serene and beautiful. The grace of the sky 
and of the landscape would seem to have been perpetually 
present in the artist's mind who designed it. This archi- 
tecture has also the smiling simplicity, which is the 
characteristic of all youth — while the African has a kind 
of dumb, ante-living, ante-sunlight character, like that of 
an embryo Titan. 

"When the Greeks came to Egypt, they brought Greece 
with them, and the last living traces of antique Egypt 
began to disappear. They even changed the names of 
cities, and meddled with the theology, and in art the 
Greek genius was soon evident — yet as blending and 
beautifying, not destroying — and the Ptolemaic temples, 
while they have not lost the massive grandeur of the 
Pharaohnic, have gained a greater grace. A finer feeling is 
apparent in them — a lighter and more genial touch — a 
lyrical sentiment which does not appear in the dumb old 
epics of Aboo Simbel, and of Gerf Hoseyn. They have an 
air of flowers, and freshness, and human feeling. They are 
sculptured with the same angular heroes, and gods, and 
victims, but while these are not so well done as in the 
elder temples, and indicate that the Egyptians themselves 
were degenerate in the art, or that the Greeks who attained 
the same result of mural commemoration in a loftier 
manner at home, did it clumsily in Egypt^ — the general 
effect and character of the temples is much more beautiful 
to the eye. The curious details begin to yield to the com- 
plete whole — a gayer, more cultivated, farther advanced 
race has entered and occupied. 



220 KILE NOTES. 



The Howadji will check himself here, as he stumbles 
over a fallen hieroglyphed column in the moonlight. But 
this temple of Dekkar was a proper place to say so much 
for the abused temples of Ptolemaic times ; for this is a 
building of Ergamun, an Ethiopian prince, and a neighbor 
of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who had seen Greece and learned 
a little wisdom, and made a stand in a temple, probably on 
this very site, against the ignorant tyranny of priests, not 
supposing, as Sir Grardiner aptly remarks, '' that belief in 
the priests signified belief in the Grods, whom he failed not 
to honor with due respect.'' 

Sir Gardiner quotes the story from Diodorus, that " the 
most extraordinary thing is what relates to the death of their 
kings. The priests, who superintend the worship- of the 
Gods and the ceremonies of religion, in Meroe, enjoy such 
unlimited power, that whenever they choose they send a 
messenger to the king, ordering him to die, for that the Gods 
had given this command, and no mortal could oppose their 
will, without being guilty of a crime. They also add other 
reasons, which would influence a man of weak mind, ac- 
customed to give way to old custom and prejudice, and with- 
out sufficient sense to oppose such unreasonable commands- 
In former times, the kings had obeyed the priests, not by com- 
pulsion, but out of mere superstition, until Ergamenes, who 
ascended the throne of Ethiopia, in the time of the second 
Ptolemy, a man instructed in the sciences and philosophy 
of Greece, was bold enough to defy their orders. And having 
made a resolution worthy of a prince, he repaired with his 
troops to a fortress, or high place, where a golden temple of 



NORTHWARD. 221 



the Ethiopians stood, and there having slain all the priests, 
he abolished the ancient custom, and substituted other in- 
stitutions, according to his own will." 

We may thank Grreece possibly for that. Yet that we 
may enjoy the satisfaction of making ourselves cotemporary 
with such histories, let us refer to Frederic Werne's White 
Nile, and discover that races, neighbors of our tree- worship- 
ing friends, the Dinkas, if not sometimes our very friends 
themselves, continue this habit, and allow the priests to no- 
tify the kings to die. As yet has arisen no Dinka Ergamun. 
But such always do arise — some Ergamun or Luther or 
Strauss, and protest with blood or books against the priests, 
although tree-worshiping Dinkas, who unthrone their king 
on a three-legged stool, may plead the South, and so stand 
absolved from this duty. 

Muse a moment longer in these moonlight ruins, and 
observing brave King Ergamun hieroglyphed (say the 
learned) *' king of men, the hand of Amun, the living, cho- 
sen of Re, son of the sun, Ergamun ever-living, the beloved 
of Isis ;" let the faint figures of those elders pass by and 
perceive that you honor them, though you do think the 
Grreek architecture more beautiful. The glare of Seyd's 
torch reveals upon these walls figures and a faith that is 
not less dear to the Howadji, as history, than any other. 
But the forms fade in the misty moonlight, as their names 
are fading out of history. Perhaps, after all, Mohammad 
Alee was as good and glorious as Ramses the Grreat, whom 
the Grreeks called Sesostris, or any of the Thothmes. 

Who knows? — ^perhaps they were. 



222 NILE NOTES. 



Harriet Martineau, indeed, and the other poetical Ho- 
wadji, are inclined to doubt whether there were any wry- 
necks or squint-eyes in those days of giants, and you can 
not say yea or nay, for the great darkness. 

Who knows? perhaps there were not. 

Grreat they clearly were, for they built these temples and 
graved the walls with their own glory. But they have the 
advantage of the dark, while Mohammad Alee and Julius 
Csesar stand in the broad daylight with all their wrinkles. 
Besides, when men have been dead a few thousand years, 
if their names escape to us across the great gulf of Time, 
it is only decent to take them in and entertain them kindly ; 
especially is it becoming to those Howadji who sail their river 
along the shores they so ponderously piled with grandeur. 

But the Ptolemies, as well. Luxor, Dendereh, Edfoo, 
Kum Ombos, Philse, and the temples at Karnak — ^these are 
part of Egypt. poetic and antiquity-adoring Howadji, 
this jealousy of the Greeks is sadly unpoetic. Look at this 
little Dekkar temple and confess it. Remember Philse and 
ask forgiveness. "Why love the Ptolemies less, because you 
love the Pharaohs more ? Spite of Yolney and this Nu- 
bian moonlight, itself a rich reward of long voyaging, the 
Howadji will not be sad and solemn about the Egyptians, 
because they were a great people and are gone. The 
Grreeks had a much finer architecture, and a much more 
graceful nature — they were not so old as these. But there 
were elder than the Egyptians, and wiser and fairer, even 
the sons of the morning, for heaven lies around the world 
in its infancy, as well as around us. * 



NORTHWARD. - 223 



The Howadji left the little temple to the moonlight and 
the jackals. The village was startled from sleep again by 
our return, and the crew were sleeping upon the deck ; 
but in a few moments there was no more noise, and the 
junk was floating down in the moonlight, while its choicer 
freight was clouded in the azure mist of Latakia, and heard 
only the Sakias and the throbbing oars and at times the 
wild, Satanic rowing-song of the men, which Satan Saleh 
led with his diabolical quaver and cry. 

Yet when another day had burnt away, the same 
moonlight showed us Kalab-sheh, the largest Nubian ruin. 
It is directly upon the tropic, which makes it pleasant to 
the imagination, but is a mass of uninteresting rubbish of 
Roman days. For the Howadji will not plead for Roman 
remains in Egypt, which have no more character than Ro- 
man art elsewhere ; and Roman art in Baalbec, in Egypt 
and in Italy, is only Grecian art thickened from poetry 
into prose. It is one vast imitation, and the essential char- 
acter is forever lost. But close by is a small rock temple of 
the '' golden prime" of Ramses the Grreat, and passing the 
animated sculptures, and entering, the Howadji stands be- 
tween two Doric columns. They are fluted, and except 
that they are low, like foundation columns, have all the 
grace of the Grreek Doric. These columns occur once more 
near Minyeh, in Egypt, at the caves or tombs of Beni Has- 
san, and are there quite as perfect as in any G-recian temple. 
In this moonlight, upon the very tropic, that fact looms 
very significantly upon the Howadji's mind. But how 
can he indulge speculation, or reach conclusions, while 



224 NILE NOTES. 



Saleh who bears the torch crate is perpetually drawing his 
attention to the walls, on which are sculptured processions 
bearing offerings to great Ramses who built this temple, 
and who seems to have done every thing else in Egypt 
until the Ptolemies came ? There are rings and bags of 
gold, leopard-skins, ostrich-eggs, huge fans, and beasts, 
lions, gazelles, oxen, then plants and skins. A historical 
sketch occupies another wall — the great Eamses, repre- 
sented as three times the size of his foes, pursuing them 
into perdition. There is a little touch of a wounded man 
taken home by his comrades, while a little one runs to 
'' announce the sad news to its mother," pathetically says 
Sir Grardiner, speaking of sculptures that, to the Howadji's 
eye, have no more human interest or tenderness, or variety 
of expression, than the chance forms of clouds or foliage. 

But the Nubian days were ending, and the great gate 
of the cataract was already audible, roaring as it turned. 
Hassan piloted us safely through the half-cataracts, and the 
fantastic rock vistas abotit Phil^ were already around us. 
Beautiful in the mild morning stood the holy island, full 
of fairy figures that came and went, and looked and lin- 
gered — Ariel-beauties among the Caliban grotesqueness 
of the pass. It was the vision of a moment only, scarcely 
more distinct than in memory, and the next we were 
pausing at Mahratta, where the Reis of the Cataract, by 
the terms of the Treaty, was bound to pilot the boat back 
again to Syene. 



XXXIII. 

Utj i\}t #rnr^ nf ini. 

It was a bright, sparkling morning, and all the people 
of Mahratta seemed to be grouped upon the shore to re- 
ceive with staring wonder the boat that had undergone 
in itself the Pythagorean Metempsychosis taught by the old 
teachers at neighboring Philse — the boat that had fiown 
southward a wide-winged Ibis, and floated slowly back 
again a cumbrous junk — a swift bird no longer, but a 
heavy bug rather, sprawling upon the water with the long 
clumsy oars for its legs. There were two or three slave 
boats at Mahratta — although we had passed scarce a sail 
in lonely Nubia. The brisk, busy shore was like awaking 
again after a long sleep— yet, believe me, it was only as 
one seems to awake, in dreams. For the spell was not dis- 
solved at Mahratta — nor yet at Cairo — and if at Beyrout 
to the eye, yet it still thralls the mind and memory. 

The Captain of the Cataract was absent, piloting an 
English Howadji through the rapids, but his lieutenant 
and substitute, one of the minor captains, and our former 
friend of the kurbash, were grinning gayly as we drove 
smoothly up to the bank — the latter touching up a dusky 
neighbor occasionally with his instrument, in the exuber- 



226 NILE NOTES. 



ance of his delighted expectation of incessant kurbashing 
for a brace of hours, on our way to Syene. The motley 
crowd tumbled aboard. As at Syene, our own crew became 
luxuriously superfluous — for a morning they were as in- 
dolent as the Howadji, and tasted for that brief space the 
delight which was perpetual in the blue cabin. For it is 
a sorrow and shame to do any thing upon the Nile or in 
Egypt but float, fascinated, and let the landscape be your 
mind and imagination, full of poetic forms. An Egyptian 
always works as if he were on the point of pausing, and 
regarded labor as an unlovely incident of the day. The 
only natural position of an Eastern is sitting or reclining. 
But these Nile sailors sit upon their haunches, or inelegantly 
squat like the vases that stand in the tombs, and- with 
as much sense of life as they. The moment a man becomes 
inactive upon the shore, he is enchanted into a permanent 
figure of the landscape. The silence enchants him, and 
makes his repose so profound and lifeless, that it deepens 
the impression of silence. But the dusky denizens of 
Mahratta leaped and scrambled upon the boat, like impatient 
souls very dubious of safe ferryage — for returning to the 
Cataract confusion, we return to our old similitudes. Si- 
lence, too, shuddered, as they rushed yelping upon the 
junk, as if its very soul had gone out of it forever ; and 
piling themselves upon the deck and the bulwarks, and 
seizing the huge, cumbrous oars, they commenced, under 
brisk kurbashing, to push from the shore, quarreling and 
shouting, and mad with glee and excitement, in entire 
insanity of the " savage faculty." 



BYTHEGRACEOFGOD. 227 

The Howadji stood at the blue cabin door, helpless — 
perhaps hopeless, in the grim chaos, and turning backward, 
as the boat slid from the shore upon the glassy stream, 
beheld Nubia and the farther South faint away upon the 
rosy bosom of the morning. 

The day was beautiful and windless — the air clear and 
brilliant. No wind could have benefited us — so tortuous 
is the channel through these rapids ; and once fairly into 
the midst of the river, its strong swift stream, eddying 
toward the cataract, swept us on to the frowning battle- 
ments of rook that rise along the rapid. The oars dipped 
slightly — but another power than theirs, an impetus from 
what bewitched fountain in the most glorious glen of the 
Mountains of the Moon, shoved us on — the speed, the near- 
ing rapid, the exhilarating morning, making this the most 
exciting day of the Nile voyaging. The men tugging by 
threes and fours at the oars, laughed and looked at the 
Howadji — their backs turned to the rapid, and mainly in- 
tent upon the kurbash which was frenziedly fulfilling its 
functions. The pilot, whose eyes were fixed fast and 
firmly upon the rock points and the boat's prow, shouted 
them] suddenly into silence at times — but only for a mo- 
ment, then again like eager, fun-overflowing boys they 
prattled and played away. 

In twenty minutes from Mahratta we were close upon 
the first and longest and swiftest rapid. The channel was 
partly cut away by Mohammad Alee, and although it con- 
ceals no rocks, it is so very narrow, and shows such 
ragged, jagged cliff sides to the stream, that with a large 



228 NILE NOTEa 



Dahabieh like ours, driving through the gurgling, foaming 
and fateful dark waters — it is a bit of adventure and 
experience to have passed. 

The instant that the strange speed with which we 
s^Yept along, indicated that the junk was sliding down 
the horizontal cataract, and the Dahabieh and Howadji 
and crew felt as chips look, plunging over water-falls 
resistless, and entirely mastered, driving dreadfully for- 
ward like a tempest-tortured ship — that moment, the pilot 
thundered caution from the tiller, and a confused scram- 
bling ensued upon deck to take in the oars, for it was not 
possible for us to pass with such wide-stretching arms 
through the narrow throat of the rapid. But there was no 
instant to lose. The river, like a live monster, plunged 
along with us upon his back. We too felt his eager motions 
under us — a swiftness of smooth undulation along which 
we rode ; and so startling was the new sudden speed, when 
we were once on the currenty slope, that it seemed as if 
our monster were dashing on to plunge us wrecked against 
the bristling sides, before we could take in our arm-like 
oars, that, rigid with horrible expectation, reached stiffly 
out toward their destruction. 

But vainly struggled and stumbled the "savage fac- 
ulty." It was clear enough that the junk was Fate's and 
Fate's only. At the same instant the Howadji saw and 
felt that before one reluctant oar, which was tied and 
tangled inextricably, could be hauled in, its blade would 
strike a rocky reach that stretched forth for it into the 
stream — which foamed and fretted at the momentary ob- 



BYTHEGRACEOFGOD. 229 

struction, then madly eddied forward. But in striking the 
rock the oar would throw the boat with its broadside to the 
stream, capsize it, and send Howadji, crew, and Mahratta 
savages beyond kurbashing. 

They saw this at the same instant, and the whole 
boat's company saw it too, and the pilot, who shouted like 
one mad, yet who was fixed fast to his post, for a single 
swerve of the rudder would be as fatal as the oar against 
the rock. The kurbash raged and fell and flourished, as 
if it foresaw the speedy end of its exercise and authority, 
and burned to use up all its vitality. But the mental 
chaos of the men of Mahratta was only more chaotic in this 
juncture, and while the oar still stretched to its fate, and 
like a mote upon a lightning flash, the frightfully steady 
boat darted through the rapid, the Pacha grasped one col- 
umn of the cabin porch, and the other Howadji the other, 
awaiting the crisis which should throw them into the 
jaws of the monster, who would dash them high up 
upon the shore below, to consume at leisure. 

All this was seen and transpired in less time than you 
occupy in reading the record. The pilot in vain endeav- 
ored to ease her from the side toward which she was tend- 
ing, and on which still and hopelessly stretched the fatal 
oar. There was universal silence and expectation, and 
then crash! struck the oar against the rock, was com- 
pletely shivered in striking, and the heavy junk, shudder- 
ing a moment, but scarce consciously, and not swerving 
from her desperate way, darted forward still, and drove 
high upon the sandy shore, at the sudden turning of the 



230 NILE NOTES. 



rapid, and the Howadji had safely passed the most appal- 
ling slope of the cataract. 

Chaos came again immediately. The pilot descended 
from his post, and expressed his opinion that such accurate 
and able pilotage deserved an extraordinary bucksheesh, 
implying, with ethics not alone oriental, that having done 
his duty, he was entitled to more than praise. The men 
of Mahratta smiled significantly at the Howadji, as if such 
remarkable exertions as theirs were possibly hardly to 
be measured by merely infidel minds, and there was a 
general air of self-satisfaction pervading all faces, as if the 
savage faculty, and not the grace of Grod, had brought us 
through the cataract. 

We tarried a little while upon the shore, and then 
glided again down the swift stream. It was only swift 
now, not startling, and the rockiness was farther with- 
drawn, and there were smooth reaches of water. We saw 
several Howadji loitering upon a sandy slope. The sun 
seemed not to sparkle, as before the descent, in the excite- 
ment of the morning, and there was the same old sunny 
tranquillity of Egypt breathing over the dying rages and 
up through the rocky ways of the cataract. It was the 
lull and repose that follow intense excitement, and of so 
suggestive a character, that the Howadji recalled with 
sympathy the aerial Aquarelle of Turner — the summit of 
the Grotthard Pass, looking toward Italy. It is a wonder- 
ful success of art, for in the warmth and depth and variety 
of the hue, which has the infinite rarity and delicacy of 
Italian air, and which seems rather a glow and rosy suf- 



BY THE GRACE OF GOD. 231 

fusion than a material medium— in that and through that, 
the bloom of Italy breathes warm beauty far into Switzer- 
land, and steeps the spectator in the South. The eye 
clings to it and bathes in it as the soul and memory in 
Italian days. So in the tender tranquillity of that morn- 
ing succeeding the rapids, all the golden greenness and 
sweet silence of Egypt below Syene, breathed beauty and 
balm over what was the Ibis. How few things are singly 
beautiful ! Is there any single beauty ? For all beauty 
seems to adorn itself with all other beauty, and while the 
lover's mistress is only herself, she has all the beauty of 
all beautiful women. 

Thus with songs singing in their minds, came the 
Howadji swiftly to Syene. The current bore us graciously 
along, like the genii that serve gracefully when once their 
pride and rage is conquered. The struggle and crisis of 
the morning only bound us more nearly to the river. 
blue-spectacled Grunning ! the dream-languor of our river 
is not passionless sloth, but the profundity of passion. And 
I pray Athor, the Queen of the West, and the Lady of 
Lovers, that so may be charactered the many winding 
courses of your life. 

But Yerde Griovane and Grunning had flown northward 
toward Thebes, leaving only miraculous memories of a de- 
jeuner at PhilaB, upon men's minds in Syene, and strange 
relics of bones and fruit-skins upon the temple ruins. Beam- 
ing elderly John Bull was also flown, and with him Mrs. 
Bull, doubtlessly still insisting that the Kaftan was a night- 
gown. And Wines and the Irish Doctor who plunged into 



232 NILE NOTES. 



the Nile mystery at Alexandria, were also gone. They were 
all off toward Thebes. But Nero v/as still deep in Nubia, 
solemnly cursing contrary winds, while Nera, quietly repos- 
ing in the sumptuous little cabin, shed the love.ly light of a 
new thought of woman like a delicate dawn upon the dusky 
mental night of the " Kid's" crew. Far under Aboo Sim- 
bel, too, fluttered the blue pennant, still streaming back- 
ward to the ^outh, whither it had pointed. The English 
consul's Dahabieh, a floating palace of delights, was at 
Syene, and the leisure barque of an artist, whose pencil, 
long dipped in the sunshine of the East, will one day mag- 
ically evoke for us the great dream of the Nile. But we 
lingered long enough only to buy some breads and as the 
full moon goldened the palm fringe of the river, the little 
feline Reis, happy to be in command once more, thrummed 
the long silent tarabuka, and with clapping hands and 
long, lingering, sonorous singing, the boat drifted slowly 
down the river. 



I 



XXXIV. 

But while the Ibis flies no longer, but floats, a junk, and 
for the Howadji has forever furled her wings, they step ashore 
ast he boat glides idly along, and run up among the mud cab- 
ins and the palm-groves. They were always the same thing, 
like the lay-figure of an artist, which he drapes and disgui- 
ses, and makes exhaustlessly beautiful with color and form. 
So the day, with varying lights and differing settings of 
the same relief, made endless picture of the old material. 
You are astonished that you do not find the Nile monoto- 
nous. Palms, shores and hills, hills, shores and palms, and 
ever the old picturesqueness of costume, yet fresh and 
beautiful every day as the moon every month, and the 
stars each evening. This is not to be explained by novelty, 
but by the essential beauty of the objects. Those objects are 
shapeless mud huts for instance, Reverend Dr. Duck, voy- 
aging upon the Nile with Mrs. Duck for the balm of the Af- 
rican breath, and finding the scenery sadly monotonous. But 
birds can not sing until the pie is opened, Doctor, nor can 
eyes see, until all films are removed. Yet stretching your 
head a little upward, as we sit upon this grass clump on the 



234 NILE NOTES. 



high, bank of the river, you shall see something that will 
make Egypt always memorable to you. For, as we sat 
there one morning, we saw a dark, undulating mass upon 
the edge of the fog bank that was slowly rolling northward 
away. I thought it a flight of pigeons, but the Pacha 
said that it did not move like pigeons. 

The mass, now evidently a flight of birds, came sweep- 
ing southward toward us, high in the blue air and veering 
from side to side like a ship in tacking. With every sun- 
ward sweep, their snow-white bodies shone like a shower 
of most silver stars, or rather, to compare large things 
with small, if Bacchus will forgive, they floated suspended 
in the blue air like flakes of silver, as the gold flakes hang 
in a vessel of eau de Dantzic. 

There was a graceful, careless order in their flying, 
and as they turned from side to side, the long lines undu- 
lated in musical motion. I have never seen movement 
so delicious to the eye as their turning sweep. The long 
line throbbed and palpitated as if an electric sympathy 
was emitted from the pure points of their wings. There 
was nothing tumbling or gay in their impression, but 
an intense feeling of languid life. Their curves and 
movements were voluptuous. The southern sun flashed 
not in vain along their snowiness, nor were they, without 
meaning, flying to the south. There was no sound but 
the whirring of innumerable wings, as they passed high 
over our heads, a living cloud between us and the sun. 
Now it was a streaming whiteness in the blue, now it was 
as mellowly dark, as they turned to or from the sun. 



FLAMINGOES. 235 



and so advanced, the long lines giving and trembling some- 
times, like a flapping sail in a falling breeze, then belly- 
ing roundly out again, as if the wind had risen. When 
they were directly above us, one only note was dropped 
from some thoughtful flamingo, to call attention to the 
presence of strangers below. But beyond musket-shot, 
even if not beyond fear, as they undoubtedly were, the 
fair company swept on unheeding — a beautiful boon for the 
south, and laden with what strange tidings from northern 
woods ! The bodies were rosy white and the wings black, 
and the character of their flight imparted an air of delicacy 
and grace to all association with the birds, so that it is 
natural and pleasant to find that Roman Apicius, the Epi- 
curean, is recorded to have discovered the exquisite relish 
of the flamingo's tongue, and a peculiar mode of dressing 
it. The Howadji had not been unwilling at dinner to have 
tasted the delicate tongue that shed the one note of warn- 
ing. But long before dinner the whir of beautiful wings, 
and the rose-cloud of flamingoes had died away deep into 
the south. 

The poor, unwinged Ibis claimed no kindred as the 
birds flew by, but clung quietly to the shore. The sun, too, in 
setting — well, is it not strange that in the radiant purple 
of sunset and dawn — ^the Fellahs^ denizens of these melan- 
choly mud cabins, behold the promise of the plague ? "What 
sympathy have we with those who see a plague-spot in 
the stately splendor of these sunsets ? 

Day by day, as we descended, we were enjoying the 
feast which we had but rehearsed in ascending. Edfoo, 



236 NILE NOTES. 



Kum Ombos, El Kab— names of note and marks of mem- 
ory. Men dwell in tombs still, and came out to offer us all 
kinds of trinkets and gay wares. Then upon dog-like don- 
keys we rode with feet dangling on the ground, across the 
green plain of the valley to the Arabian desert, whose line 
is as distinctly and straightly marked along the green, as 
the sea line along the shore. The cultivated plain does 
not gradually die away through deeper and more sandy 
barrenness into the desert, but it strikes it with a shock, 
and ends suddenly ; and the wide- waving corn and yellow 
cotton grow on the edge of the sand, like a hedge. The 
Howadji, embarked in his little cockle-boat of a donkey, 
puts out to desert as little boats to sea, and scrambling up 
the steep sand-sides of the first hills, sees upon the grotto- 
walls of El Kab much of the cotemporary history of the 
life and manners of antique Egypt. The details of social 
customs and the habits of individual life are painted upon 
the walls, so that the peculiar profession of the occupant 
of the tomb can be easily determined. But let us cling 
to the sunshine as long as possible, for we shall explore 
tombs and darkness enough at Thebes. 



XXXV. 

(Chnpntrn. 

"Ant. Most sweet Queen." 

A VOLUPTUOUS morning awakened the Howadji under 
the shore at Erment. Cloudless the sky as Cleopatra's 
eyes, w^hen they looked on Caesar. Warmly rosy the azure 
that domed the world, as if to-day it were a temple dedi- 
cate to beauty. And stepping ashore, to the altars of 
beauty we repaired. No sacrificial, snowy lambs, no gar- 
lands of gorgeous flowers, did the worship require. The 
day itself was flower and feast and triumphal song. The 
day itself lingered luminously along the far mountain 
ranges, paling in brilliance and over the golden green of 
the spacious plain, that was a flower-enameled pavement 
this morning, for our treading, as if unceasingly to remind 
us that we went as worshipers of beauty only, and the 
fame of beauty that fills the world. 

The Howadji confesses that no Egyptian morning is 
more memorable to him than this, for nothing Egyptian 
is so cognate to our warm-blooded human sympathy as 
the rich romance of Cleopatra and her Roman lovers. 
After the austere impression of the elder Egyptian monu- 



238 NILE NOTES, 



ments, this simply human and lovely association was 
greatly fascinating. Ramses to-day was not great. Ho 
subdued Babylon, but Cleopatra conquered Julius Caesar. 
Marc Antony called his Cleopatra-children, kings of kings. 
The conqueror of the conqueror was the divinity of the 
day. 

I know not if it were the magic of the morning, but 
the world to-day was Cleopatra. Hers was the spirit of 
the air, the lines of the landscape. In any land the same 
day would have suggested her perpetually to the imagina- 
tion — for there are Grreek and Roman days, Italian and 
Sicilian, Syrian and African. And these days correspond 
in character with the suggestion they make. Many and 
many a day had the Howadji seen and loved the -serpent 
of old Nile, before he beheld Africa, many a long June 
day had been tranced in Italy in the Fornarina's spell, 
many a twilight had lingered along G-alilean heights with 
him to whom the Syrens of the Syrian sky, Love and 
Pleasure and Ambition, sang in vain, and that long before 
he had trod the broad silent way of waters, that leads the 
Western to them, and which keeps them forever cool and 
consecrate in his imagination. These dreams, or realities 
of feeling, were not occasioned by pictures or poems, but 
were the sentiment of the day. The soul seems then sen 
suously to apprehend the intensity of emotion that is sym- 
bolized. And when you travel into the lands of which you 
read and dreamed, you will be touched with your want of 
surprise in their delights. But many an unheeded silent 
strain of sunshine, or night- appalling tempest, had sung 



CLEOPATRA. 239 



and thundered their sacred secret to your mind. The day, 
therefore, was so much Cleopatra, that only the fairest fate 
could have drifted us upon that morning to the shore of 
Erment. 

The forms and hues of old Egypt were vague and pale 
in the presence of this modern remembrance. I confess 
that the erudite Sir Gardiner, and the Poet Martineau, do 
not very lovingly linger around Erment. I confess their 
facts. The temple is of the very last genuine Egyptian 
days, the child of the dotage of Egyptian art, when it was 
diseased and corrupted by Roman prostitution. The an- 
tique grandeur is gone. It is the remains of an interreg- 
num between the old and the new — ^the faint death-strug- 
gle of an expiring art, or if the insatiable poets demand, a 
galvanized quiver after death. All that, if the erudite and 
the antiquarian require. Here is no architectural, no the- 
ological or mystical — romantically historical and very du- 
biously moral (after the Bunyan standard) interest. This 
is the hieroglyph that might balk ChampoUion, yet which 
the merest American Howadji might read as he ran. 

For what boots it? Is not Cleopatra a radiant, the 
only radiant image, in our Egyptian annals ? Are we 
humanly related to Menmophth, or any Amunoph? Are 
not the periods of history epically poetic that treat of her, 
while they grope and reel seeking Thothmes and Amun in 
the dark ? Besides, Cleopatra sat glorious in beauty upon 
Ramses' throne, and the older thrones are, the more ven- 
erable are they. And if the great darling of Amun Re 
heroically held his heritage, grant that the child of Venus 



240 NILE NOTES. 



well lost it, melting the pearl of her inheritance in the 
glowing wine of her love. 

Neocesar should have been a God's darling, and so 
have died young. And that he might have been, but for 
the whim of Nature, who will not give the fairest blossoms 
to the noblest trees. As if she were a housewife upon 
allowance, and had not illimitable capacity of mating 
beauty with power wherever they meet. But in this 
temple of Erment we will not reproach her. For Nature 
satisfied the Ideal in giving Cleopatra to Csesar. 

Such, I suppose to have been the ox-necked Abdallah's 
musings as he stumbled up the steep bank from the junk, 
bearing the torch crate, for all Egyptian temples require 
great light to be thrown upon the interior darkness of their 
Adyta or holy of holies, and skeptical Howadji suspect 
that the dog-faithful Abdallah did it more satisfactorily 
than the priests, who, ex-officio, were the intellectual lan- 
terns of old Egypt. 

Sundry shapeless heaps of dingy blanket strewn upon 
the wind-sheltered, sun-flooded bank were the crew. They 
had diligently rowed all night, and had crept ashore to 
sleep. They too had reason to bless the " most sweet 
Q,ueen," and we left them, honoring the day and its 
divinity in their own way. 

The picture of that morning is permanent. Like all 
Egyptian pictures composed of a few grand outlines, a 
few graceful details, but charged, brimming, transfigured 
with light, and brooding over all, the profound repose of 
the azure skv — ^ which does not seem to be an arch so much 



CLEOPATRA. 241 



as to rest rosily upon the very eye — and so transparent 
that the vision is not bluffed against a blue dome, but 
sinks and sinks into all degrees of distance, like Un- 
dine's in her native watery atmosphere. It would not 
surprise the happy eye, if forms, invisible in other qualities 
of atmosphere, should float and fade in the rosiness. Such 
delicate depths imply a creation as fair — and as the eye 
swims leisurely along, the Howadji feels that it is only 
the grossness of his seeing that hides the loveliness from 
his apprehension, and yet feeling the fascination, believes 
that somewhere under the palms upon these shores, flow 
the fountains whose water shall wash away all blindness. 
And if anywhere, why not here ? Here, v/here she, the 
Queen of the South not less than her sister of Sheba, 
lived and loved. For the Persian poets sing well in the 
moonlight, that only the eyes of love see angels. Yet 
until that fountain is reached, this sky is the dream, 
the landscape its light-limned realm, and at Erment, near 
Esne, near Cleopatra, who but the gracious and graceful 
Grhawazee are the people of those dreams ? 

The Pacha with the cherished one-barrel went before, 
occasionally damaging the symmetry of family circles of 
pigeons upon the palms. Abdallah plunged like a mastiff 
after the fallen victims, and bore them grinningly in his 
hand — ^while I sedately closed the rear, dazed in the double 
radiance of the day and the Grolden-sleeve. Our path lay 
across a prairie of young grain. The unwaving level 
stretched away to the Libyan mountains — that still ranged 
along the west, silver-pale in the intense sunlight. And 

L 



242 NILE NOTES. 



still as we went, this glad morning, the world was flower- 
paven, and walled with sapphire. The plain seemed to 
shrink from the least unevenness, lest the nourishing Nile 
should not everywhere overspread it — or was it that it 
would lay a floor broad and beautiful enough to approach 
those ruined altars of beauty ? 

For they are ruins, and although it is a temple built 
by Cleopatra for the worship of Amun, upon its altars now 
no other homage is offered than to her. Grorgeous cactuses, 
and crimson-hearted roses, and glowing, abundant oleanders 
be your flower offerings when you bend before them at 
high, hot noon, and pour out no other libations there, than 
reddest and most delirious wine. 

The great temple is quite destroyed, and the remains 
of the smaller one, like all the temples of Egypt, are quarries 
of materials for the building of the neighboring mud 
villages and chance factories, which Mohammad Alee 
commenced, and which will probably gradually fall into 
disuse and decay, now that he is gone. The temple is 
but a group of columns with the walls of a court, and two 
interior chambers upon which are sculptures representing 
Cleopatra and Neocesar with godly titles offering homage 
and gifts to the Gods. The few remaining columns rise 
handsomely from the sand and dust heaps that surround 
all temples here. They are evidently of the latest Ptole- 
maic days — but to the uninitiated in architectural ac- 
curacy — to those who can also enjoy what is not absolutely 
perfect in its kind but even very imperfect, these groups 
are yet graceful and pleasing. How can stately sculptures 



CLEOPATRA. 243 



bearing forms so famous, be otherwise in a mud and sand 
wilderness ? The sculptures themselves are poor and fast 
crumbling. Yet although fast crumbling, here is the only 
authentic portrait of Cleopatra. This is she — of whom 
Enotarbus said in words that shall outlive these sculptures 
and give her to a later age than any thing material may 
attain — 

" Age can not wither her — nor custom stale 
Her infinite variety. Other women 
Cloy the appetites they feed — ^but she makes hungry 
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things 
Become themselves in her ; that the holy Priests 
Bless her when she is riggish." 

The Persian poets sing farther when the moon is at the 
full, that only lovers' tongues speak truly. 

You will not expect to find a perfect portrait upon 
these walls, and will see her sitting and holding Neocesar 
in her lap, as Isis holds Horus at Philse — while she offers 
gifts to the bull Basis. And although this temple was 
covered all over with the rudely sculptured form and face 
of the fairest Q^ueen of History, I could find but two which 
were tolerably perfect and individual. 

The first is upon one of the columns of the transverse 
colonnade of the portico.- The features are quite smaD. 
The nose, which seems strongly to mark the likeness, 
departs from all known laws of nasal perfection, and curves 
the wrong way. Isis — and Athor, Greek Aphrodite, 
if Cleopatra had a pug nose ! Yet it is more pug than 



244 NILE NOTES. 





aquiline or Grecian, — a seemingly melancholy occurrence 
in a face so famously fair. 

But I found that this peculiarity of feature, by its very 
discord with the canons of beauty, suggested the soul that 

t have so radiantly illuminated the face into its be- 
wildering beauty. Grreek statues are not the semblance 
of lovable women. The faces are fair, but far away from 
feeling. The features are exquisitely carved, and the 
graceful balance is musical to the eye. But they lack 
the play of passion — the heat-lightning of sentiment and 
soul that flushes along a thousand faces not so fair. The 
expression partakes of the quality of the material, and differs 
from life as that from flesh. Beautiful are the forms and 
faces, but they are carved in cold, colorless marble— not in 
rosy flesh. It is the outline of the Venus form, not her face, 
that is fascinating. Among G-reek sculptures no face is 
so permanently beautiful as the head of Clytie — and that 
because it is so charged with the possibility of human 
experience. The others do not seem serenely superior to 
that experience like the Egyptian Colossi, but simply soul- 
less. The beautiful story of Clytie is felt through her face. 
For when Apollo deserted her for Leucothoe, she revealed 
his love to the father of her rival. But Apollo only despised 
her the more, and the sad Clytie drooped and died into the 
heliotrope or sun-flower, still forever turning toward the 
sun. Nor less fair the fate of her rival, w^ho was buried 
alive by her father ; and love-lorn Apollo, unable to save 
her, sprinkled nectar and ambrosia upon her grave, which 
reached her body and changed it into a beautiful tree that 



CLEOPATRA. 246 



bears the frankincense. How well sound these stories at 
Erment, while we remember Cleopatra and look upon her 
likeness I 

The very departure from the ordinary laws of sculp- 
tured beauty only suggests that loftier and more alluring, 
where the soul suffuses the features. And this being ever 
the most intimate and profound beauty, the queenly charm 
spread from the face as we looked, and permeated the 
whole person. Cleopatra stands in imagination now, not a 
beautiful brunette merely, but a mysteriously fascinating 
woman. " My serpent of old Nile," was a truth of the 
lover's tongue. 

Roman and man as Julius CaBsar was, he was too 
much a Roman and a man to have been thrall to prettiness 
merely. There must have been a glorious greed of passion 
in an Italian nature like his and Marc Antony's, which 
only the very soul of Southern voluptousness could have so 
satisfied and enchained. Nor allow any Western feeling to 
mar the magnificence of the picture which this place and 
day, set with those figures, offers to your delight. Let us 
please imagination with these stately figures of history. 
Grranting all the immoralities and improprieties, if they 
seem such to you, let them go as not pertinent to the occa- 
sion. But the grace, and the beauty, and the power, the 
sun behind his spots, are the large inheritance of all 
time. "Why should we insist upon having all the in- 
convenience of cotemporaries whose feet were pinched and 
sides squeezed by these so regal figures ? Why should we 
encase ourselves triply and triply in a close ball of petty 



246 NILE NOTES, 



prejudices and enlightened ideas, and go tumbling, beetle- 
like, through the moonlighted halls of history, instead of 
floating upon butterfly wings and with the song and soar- 
ing of the lark ? The Howadji will use his advantage of 
distance, and not see the snakes and sharp stones which he 
knows are upon the mountains, but only the graceful 
grandeur of the outline against the sky. 

Education is apt to spoil the poetry of travel by so 
starting us in the dry ruts of prejudice, or even upon the 
turnpike of principle, that we can scarcely ever see the 
most alluring landscape except at right angles, and doubt- 
fully and hurriedly over our shoulders. Yet if Cleopatra 
had done so, would the Howadji have tarried at Erment ? 
The great persons and events that notch time in passing, 
do so because nature gave them such an excessive and exag- 
gerated impulse, that wherever they touch they leave their 
mark; and that intense humanity secures human sym- 
pathy beyond the most beautiful balance, which indeed 
the angels love, and which we are learning to appreciate. 

, For what is the use of being a modern, with the priv- 
ilege of tasting every new day as it ripens, if we can not 
leave in the vaults of antiquity what we choose ? Was 

• Alexander less the great because he had a wry neck ? 
Leave the wry neck behind. You may bring forth all 
the botches of the stonecutters, if you will, but mine be 
the glorious booty of the Laocoon, of the Venus and the 
Apollo. I shall not therefore say that the artist who 
wrought works so fair, did not botch elsewhere. But I 
certainly shall not inquire. 



L E P A T R A. 247 



In like manner Julius Csesar and Queen Cleopatra 
being of no farther influence upon human affairs, imagina- 
tion sucks from history all the sweet of their story and 
builds honey-hives nectarean. The Howadji fears that the 
clerical imagination at Erment might not do so — that all 
the reform and universal peace societies would miss the 
Cleopatra charm. But their vocation is not wandering 
around the world and being awakened by voluptuous 
mornings. Their honey is hived from May flowers of rhet- 
oric in the tabernacle, to which the zealous and " panoplied 
in principle" must repair, passing Cleopatra by. 

The village of Erment balances singularly this glowing 
Grhazeeyah fame by offsetting the undoubted temple of the 
doubtful Cleopatra with a vague claim of being the birth- 
place of Moses. We did not tarry long enough to resolve 
the question, although as he was found by Pharaoh's 
daughter among the bulrushes of the lower Nile, there is 
no glaring impossibility that he may have been born at 
Erment. 

Disregarding Moses, we cordially cursed the shekh of 
the village, who has coolly put his mud hovel upon the 
roof of the adyta of the temple, and quite as coolly convert- 
ing the adyta themselves into dungeons. The modern 
Egyptian has not the slightest curiosity or interest in the 
noble remains of his land. He crawls around them, and 
covers them with mud cells, in which he and his swarm 
like vermin. But speak them fair as you would water 
rats. Without ideas, how can they feel the presence of 
ideas? We passed through the mud- walled court be- 



248 NILE NOTES. 



low the shekh's dwelling to reach the adyta of the tem- 
ple. The court was grouped with Arnout soldiers, crouch- 
ing over a fire, smoking and chatting. These Albanians 
were the fiercest part of Grandfather Mohammad's army. 
They revolted when Belzoni was in Cairo, drove the Pacha 
into the citadel, ravaged the city at leisure, and were then 
quieted. But they became altogether too fierce — assassi- 
nating quiet and moral Mohammadans on the slightest 
provocation, and Christians as they would cockroaches — 
and Grrandfather Mohammad was obliged to send the most 
of them to the destructive climate of upper Ethiopia, and 
so be gently rid of them. 

They are light-complexioned, sharp-featured, smart- 
looking men, else had Mohammad Alee not used them so 
constantly, and are by far the most intelligent-looking 
class in Egypt, for they have dashes of G-reek blood in 
their veins, and modern G-reek blood is thick with knavery. 
But their faces are as bad as bright. Like fish, they seem 
to have cold blood, and you feel that they would rather 
shoot you than not, as boys prefer sticking flies to letting 
them be. Hence a certain interest with which the passing 
Howadji regards their silver-mounted pistols. 

We paused a moment at the door of the Adytum, and 
a swarm of unclean women came clustering out. They 
were the relatives of the prisoners whom the government 
held in the dungeons. There was no light in the small 
chamber which we stooped to enter, except what curious 
daylight stole shrinkingly in at the low door. Abdallah 
lighted his torch, and we looked around upon the holy of 



CLEOPATRA. 249 



holies of Queen Cleopatra. The Adytum was small, and 
reeked with filth and stench. Two or three prisoners lay 
miserably upon the damp floor, and we held our glaring 
torch over them, and looked at the sculptures on the walls. 
But without much heart. It was sorry work, and we 
made it brief — the indulgence of curiosity and sentiment 
in so sad a society. 

There was a little inner room, upon the walls of which 
we found the other portrait of the queen. But I could not 
remain — imagination and the mere human stomach re- 
coiled. For in this Adytum of Adyta in Cleopatra's tem- 
ple, — the olive-browed, — the odorous, — was uncleanness 
such as scarcely the pilgrim to the Tarpeian rock has con- 
ceived. 

We passed through the court unshot, and through the 
dusty village, whose myriad dogs, and of especial foul 
fame even in Egypt, barked frantically, and so emerged 
upon the corn stubble and the coarse hilfeh grass, upon the 
river bank. Then through a palm-grove we entered upon 
greener reaches, and sat down upon a high point over the 
river to await the boat, which was to float slowly down 
and meet us. The perfection of the day lacked only a 
vision of leisure, graceful life. And what other could 
the vision be upon that point in the calm air, high over 
the calm water, but that of the queen's barge, sumptu- 
ously sliding upon the golden gleam ? Behold it, dreamer, 
where it comes : 

" The barge she sat in like a burnished throne, 
Burned on the water : the poop was beaten gold, 



w 



2«0 NILE NOTES, 



Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that 

The winds were love-sick with them : the oars were silver, 

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made 

The water which they beat to follow faster. 

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, 

It beggared all description : she did he 

In her pavilion (cloth of gold, of tissue) 

O'erpicturing that Yenus, where we see 

The fancy outwork nature. On each side her 

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, 

With diverse -colored fans, whose wind did seem 

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool — 

And what they undid, did." 

" O rare for Antony !" 
"Her gentlewomen like the Nereides, 
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, 
And made their bends adornings. At the helm 
A seeming mermaid steers, the silken tackle 
Swells with the touches of those flower-soft hands, 
That yarely frame the office. From the barge 
A strange, invisible perfume hits the sense 
Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast 
Her people out upon her, and Antony, 
Enthroned in the market-place, did sit alone 
Whistling to the air, which, but for vacancy. 
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra, too, 
And made a gap in nature." 

" Rare Egyptian." 

** There's the junk," said the Pacha. 

" She be float very quick," said Grolden-sleeve, and 
sliding down the sand, we stepped on board and gave 
chase to Fancy's fair flotilla. Fair and fleet, it floated on, 
away, nor ever comes to shore. But still through the 
cloudless calm of sky and stream your dreaming sees it 



CLEOPATRA. 251 



pass, with measured throb of languid oars, voluptuous 
music voicing the day's repose. 

In the afternoon, we dropped leisurely down the river 
to Thebes. Before sunset we were moored to the shore of 
Luxor, on the eastern side of the stream, and almost in the 
shadow of the temple. A cluster of Howadji's boats clung 
to the shore with gay streamers and national flags, and all 
over the shore sat and stood groups of natives with trinkets 
and curiosities to sell, or donkeys to let. We strolled up 
to the temple of Luxor, and looked westward over the 
mountains of the *' Libyan suburb," as Herodotus calls 
the part of the city upon the western shore. It was cov- 
ered with temples and tombs then, but the great mass of 
the city was on the eastern bank, where Luxor now stands. 
The highlands were exquisitely hued in the sunset. But 
Patience was so belabored with an universal shriek of 
bucksheesh, that she fled to the junk again, and recovered 
in the cool calm of Theban starlight. 



XXXVI. 

" Heard melodies are sweet, — but those unheard are sweeter." 

From earliest childhood Memnon was the central, com- 
manding figure in my fancies of the East. Rising imagi- 
nation struck first upon his form, and he answered in 
music — wondrous, wooing, winning, that must needs vi- 
brate forever, although his voice is hushed. Whether this 
was from an instinctive feeling, that this statue and its 
story were a kind of completeness and perfection in art — 
the welcome recognition of art by nature — or more proba- 
bly from the simple marvelousness and beauty of the tale, 
I shall inquire of the Sphinx. As we passed up the river, 
and I beheld in the solemn, sunless morning light, like 
a shadowed, thoughtful summer day, the majestic form 
sitting serenely upon the plain, the most prominent and 
noticeable object in the landscape, I knew that memories 
would linger around him as hopes had clustered, and that 
his calm grandeur would rule my East forever. 

For throned upon ruined Thebes sits Memnon, himself 
a ruin, but regal still. Once seen he is aways seen, and 
sits as uncrumbling in memory as in the wide azure silence 



MEMNON. 253 



of his Libyan plain. Daily comes the sun as of old, and in- 
spires him no longer. Son of the morning ! why so silent ? 
Yet not dumb utterly, sing still the Persians, when poets 
listen, kindred sons of the morning. 

Yearly comes the Nile humbly to his feet, and laving 
them, pays homage. Then receeding slowly, leaves water 
plants wreathed around the throne, on which he is sculp- 
tured as a good genius harvesting the lotus, and brings a 
hundred travelers to perpetuate the homage. 

The history of art says little of Memnon and his mate, 
and the more perfect colossi of Aboo Simbel. Yet it is in 
these forms that the Howadji most strongly feels the ma- 
turity of the Egyptian mind — more strongly than in the 
temples whose sculptures are childish. But here you feel 
that the artist recognized, as we do to-day, that serene re- 
pose is the attitude and character of godlike grandeur. 

Nor are there any works of art so well set in the land- 
scape, save the Pestum temples in their sea-shored, moun- 
tain-walled prairie of flowers. Standing between the 
columns of Neptune's temple at Pestum, let the lover of 
beauty look out over the bloom-brilliant plain to the blue 
sea, and meditate of Memnon. Then, if there be pictures 
or poems or melodies in his mind, they will be Minerva- 
born, and surprise himself. Yet he will have a secreter 
sympathy with these forms than with any temple, how 
grand or graceful soever. Yes, and more than with any 
statue that he recalls. And that sympathy will be greater 
in the degree that these are grander. Not the elastic grace 
of the Apollo will seem so cognate to him as the melan- 



254 NILE NOTES. 



oholy grandeur of Memnon. For these forms impress man 
with himself. These are our forms, and how wondrously 
fashioned ! In them, we no longer succumb to the land- 
scape, but sit individual and imperial, under the sky, by the 
mountains and the river. Man is magnified in Memnon. 

These sublime sketches in stone are an artist's work. 
They are not mere masses of uninformed material. And 
could we know to-day the name of him who carved them 
in their places, not the greatest names of art should be 
haloed with more radiant renown. In those earlier days, 
art was not content with the grace of nature, but coped 
with its proportions. Vain attempt, but glorious ! It was 
to show us as we are ideally in nature, not the greatest, 
but the grandest. And to a certain degree this success is 
achieved. The imitative Romans essayed the same thing. 
But their little men they only made larger little men by 
carving them fifty feet high. Out of Nero, Tiberius or 
Caligula to make an imposing work of art, although you 
raised the head to the clouds, was more than Eoman or 
G-reek, or any human genius could achieve. It was still 
littleness on a great scale. Size is their only merit, and 
the elaborate detail of treatment destroys, as much as possi- 
ble, all the effect of size. But the Egyptian Colossi present 
kings, of kingliness so kingly that they became G-ods in the 
imagination of men, and remain Grods in their memories. 

Vain attempt, says truly the thoughtful artist. But 
glorious, responds the poet. Vain and glorious as the at- 
tempt of youth to sculpture in hard life its elastic hope. 
Failure fairer than general success. Like the unfinished 



MEMNON. 255 



statues of Michel Angelo — unfinished, as if an ideal ever 
too lofty and various haunted his imagination, whereto 
human tools were insufficient. Alone in sculpture, Michel 
Angelo's Night and Moses are peers of the realm of Mem- 
non and the Aboo Simbel Colossi. 

Looking into the morning mists of history and poetry, 
the Howadji finds that Homer mentions Memnon as a son 
of Aurora and Titho, King of Ethiopia, and brother of 
Priam, the most beautiful of warriors, who hastened with 
myriads of men to assist uncle Priam against the Grreeks. 
Achilles slew Memnon under the walls of Troy, and the 
morning after his death, as Aurora put aside the darkness 
and looked vaguely and wan along the world, the first level 
look that touched the lips of the hitherto silent statue upon 
the plain, evoked mysterious music. There were birds, too, 
memnonides, who arose from out the funeral pyre of Mem- 
non, and as he burned, fought fiercely in the air, so that 
more than half fell offerings to his manes. Every year 
they return to renew the combat, and every year with low 
wailings they dip their wings in the river water, and care- 
fully cleanse the statue. Dew-diamonded cobwebs, fasci- 
nating fable, history ! 

Emperors, historians, and poets heard this sound, or 
heard of it, nor is there any record of the phenomenon an- 
terior to the Romans. Strabo is the first that speaks of it, 
and Strabo himself heard it. But the statue was then 
shattered, and he did not know if the sound proceeded from 
the Colossus or the crowd. Singularly enough, the sound 
is not mentioned before the statue was broken, nor after it 



256 



NILE NOTES. 



was repaired, a space of about two hundred years. Yet 
during that time it uttered the seven mystic vowels, which 
are the very heart of mysteries to us. To Hadrian, the em- 
peror, it sang thrice of a morning, yet to the Emperor Sev- 
erus, who repaired it, it was always silent. But Severus 
came as a raging religionist, a pious Pagan, while Hadrian 
stood with Antinous, whom the morning loved and stole 
early away. For they die young whom the gods love, and 
Aurora is their friend. The Persian poets would like to 
be quoted here, but, Persians, it was your King 0am- 
byses who shattered our statue. You may yet read the 
words sculptured upon its sides, speaking sadly and strangely 
out of the dim depths of that antiquity, which yet waxed 
and waned under this same blue sky, with the same 
mountain outline upon which your eye, still wandering 
from Memnon, waves away into rosy reverie. " I write 
after having heard Memno. Cambyses hath wounded me, 
a stone cut into the image of the sun-king. I had once 
the sweet voice of Memno, but Cambyses has deprived me 
of the accents which express joy and grief." 

" You relate grievous things — ^your voice ia now obscure, 
O wretched Statue ! I deplore your fate." 



For these are ruins. Memnon is a mass of square blocks 
of sandstone, from the waist upward. His mate is less 
shattered. In Memnon, of course, the original idea is only 
hinted. But they were to be seen from a distance, and so 
seen, they have yet human grandeur. Memnon has still a 



MEMNON. 25Y 



distinct and mysterious interest, for no myth of the most 
graceful mythology is so significant as its story. 

Science rushes in explanatory, with poetic theories of 
sounding stones in all countries. Humboldt, for Humboldt, 
as we saw, is a poet, is only too glad to find upon the 
banks of the South American Oronoko granite rocks hail- 
ing the morning with organ majesty of music. He as- 
cribes the sound to the effect of difference of temperature 
between the subterranean and outer air. At Syene, too, 
unimaginative French Naturalists have heard a sonorous 
creaking in the granite quarries, and Napoleon's com- 
mission heard, rising from the granite ruins of Karnak, 
the same creak, at morning. Yet were it a vibration of 
expanding and contracting stone masses, why still and 
forever silent, mystic Memnon ! 

Priests clambered over night into its lap, and struck a 
metallic stone at sunrise — exclaims erudition and Sir 
G-ardiner, who climbed into the same lap at noonday, and 
striking the stone with a little hammer, produced a 
sound, which the listening peasants described in the same 
terms that Strabo uses. But were priests that struck thrice 
for Emperor Hadrian so unsycophantic grown, that even 
for Severus, the restorer of their statue and of their wor- 
ship, they would not strike at all? 

Back into romance, mystic Memnon ! Neither the 
priests who cajoled with it — nor the Pharaoh who built 
it — nor the wise who deepen its mystery, can affect the 
artistic greatness of the work, or the poetic significance 
of its story. 



258 NILE NOTES. 



The priests and Pharaohs died, and their names with 
them. But Memnon remains, not mute, though silent, and 
let the heirs of Amunoph III. claim it as his statue, from 
fame, poetry and thought, if they dare ! 

Memnon and his mate sat sixty feet into the air, before 
a temple of the said Amunoph — of which a few inarticulate 
stones lie among the grain behind. From them to the 
river, for about a mile's distance, went the Strada Regia, 
the street royal of Thebes. There was a street ! upon 
which, probably, neither Grrace church nor Trinity would 
have been imposing. Yet we are proud of the Neapolitan 
Toledo — of the Roman Corso — of the Berlin Unter den linden 
— of the Parisian Boulevards — of London Regent street, 
and we babble feebly of Broadway. But 0, if -Theban 
society was proportioned to Thebes, to have been a butterfly 
of that sunshine, a Theban sauntering of a sultry Jan- 
uary morning along the Strada Regia, and to have 
paused in the shadow of Memnon and have taken a hand — 
any hand, for the mummy merchant here will select you 
a score from under his robe, shriveled, black, tough, 
smoked-beef sort of hands — and not her lover could dis- 
tinguish the olive tapers of Thothmes III.'s darling, the 
princess Re-ni-no-fre, from the fingers of the meanest maid 
that did not dare look at her. 

Here we stand in the shadow of Memnon on a sultry 
January morning, but the princess who should meet us 
here, lies dreamless and forever in these yellow hills. Sad 
moralists, these mummy merchants, yet they say not a 
word ! 



MEMNOK 259 



An earthquake and Cambyses divide the shame of the 
partial destruction of Memnon, but it can not be destroyed. 
This air will cheat Time of a prey so precious. Yearly 
the rising Nile heaps its grave around it. Gradually the 
• earth will resume into its bosom, this mass which she 
bore — and there will hold it more undecaying than the 
mountains the embalmed bodies of its cotemporaries. Un- 
worn in an antiquity in which our oldest fancies are young, 
it will endure to an unimagined future, then, Grodlike, 
vanish unchanged. 

Pause, poet, shoreward wending. Upon the level length 
. of green young grain, smooth as the sea-calm, sits Mem- 
non by his mate. If he greet the sun no .longer in rising, 
feel in this serene sunset the song of his magnificent re- 
pose. The austere Arabian highlands are tender now. The 
lonely Libyan heights are sand no more, but sapphire. In 
ever delicater depths of blue and gold dissolve the landscape 
and the sky. It is the transfiguration of Nature, which 
each of these sunsets is — sweet and solemn and sad. 

Pause, poet, and confess, that if day dies here so di- 
vinely, the sublimest human thought could not more fitly 
sing its nativity than with the voice of Memnon. 



XXXVII. 

A DAZZLING desert defile leads to the Kings' tombs at 
Thebes. The unsparing sun burned our little cavalcade 
as it wound along. The white, glaring waste was wind- 
less, for although its hill- walls are not lofty, the way is 
narrow and stony and devious. So dreary a way must 
have made death drearier to those death-doomed royalties. 
But we donkeyed pleasantly along, like young immortals 
with all eternity before, and to us, death and tombs and 
kings were myths only. 

And what more are they, those old Egyptian monarohs 
for whom these tombs were built ? Catch if you can 
these pallid phantoms that hover on the edge of history. 
King Apappus is more a brain-vapor than Hercules, and 
our fair, far princess Re-ni-no-fre than our ever sea-fresh 
Yenus. We must believe in Apollo and the Muses, but 
Amun-m-gori III. is admitted into history solely by our 
grace. So much a living myth surpasses a dead man ! 
Give me the Parthenon, and you shall have all the tombs 
of all the Theban kings. 

They were separated from the rest of the world in the 



DEAD KINGS. 261 



tomb as in the palace. So regal was their royalty that no 
inferior was company select enough for their corpses. 
Unhappy hermits, they had to die for society, and then, 
unhappier, found only themselves. Fancy the mummied 
monarchs awaking immortal and, looking round, to find 
themselves and ancestors only! "Nothing but old Char- 
lotte," said the third saint Greorge of England. And the 
sameness of the old story must have infused most plebeian 
thoughts and desires of society, more spirited though less 
select, into the mighty monarchs' minds. For imagine the 
four English Georges buried together, and together awak- 
ing — would any celestial imagination fancy that, the 
choicest coterie of heaven ? 

Or young immortals donkeying of a bright, blue 
morning, under blue cotton umbrellas, and cheerfully chat- 
ting, can thus moralize upon monarchs at leisure, and snap 
our fingers at scurvy scepters, and crowns that make heads 
lie uneasy, and dribble Hamlet in the churchyard until we 
are sopped with self-complacent sentimentality. But co- 
temporary men, now adjacent mummies, looked on, I sup* 
pose, with more dazzled eyes when a dead king passing, 
made this defile alive. 

Possibly men were blinded by the blaze of royalty in 
those days, as, spite of the complacent American Howadji, 
they are in some others. And a thoughtful Theban watch- 
ing the progress of a royal funeral, over the Nile in barges, 
up the Strada Eegia, wherein the mighty Memnon shielded 
the eyes of many from the setting sun, then winding with 
melancholy monotony of music and gusty wail, and all 



262 NILE NOTES. 



human pomp through the solitary, sandy, stony, treeless 
defile, possibly improvised sonnets on the glory of great- 
ness, and mused upon the fate that so gilded a mortal life 
and death. 

Seventy-two days the king lay dead in his palace. 
Then his body, filled with myrrh and cassia, and cinnamon 
and all sweet spices but frankincense, was swathed in gum- 
med cloth, the cunning of life to cheat corruption, and was 
borne to the tomb which all his life he had been preparing 
and adorning. Yet life was not long enough to make the 
bed for his dreamless slumber, and usually the kings died 
before their tombs were ready. 

Such is royal death, mused that Theban, a passage to 
the delights of heaven from the delights of earth — -the ex- 
change of the silver for the golden goblet. It is symbol- 
ized by this defile, dazzling if dreary — sunny, if stony and 
sandy. Ah! Osiris, royal death is the brief, brilliant des- 
ert between the temple palace and the temple tomb. 

We saw several of these thoughtful Thebans, vapory 
shadows, musing upon the solitary rocks as we advanced. 
Presently we were embosomed in the hills. They were 
only barren and blazing, not at all awful or imposing, being 
too low and perpendicular. Besides, the rock of which they 
are composed is like a petrified sponge, and looks water- 
worn, which it is not, and unenduring. To-day the sun 
was especially genial, seeming to consider the visiting 
the tombs of kings a very cheerful business. So he shone 
ever more brilliant and burningly, and in the mazes of 
the spongy rock caught the Howadji and ogled them with 
the glaring fierceness of a lion's lust and hate. 



DEAD KINGS. 263 



"Ho, ho !" scoffed the sun. '' These were kings of men 
and great Grods and Leviathans in the land. They must 
lie apart from others in the tomb, and be sv/eet and sep- 
arate for eternity. And up this warm, winding way, a 
little after they had come hither dead, I saw Cambyses and 
his proud Persians rushing, broad alive, and after them, 
an endless host of kings, travelers, scholars, snobs, cock- 
neys and all other beasts and birds of prey, and Cambyses 
to the latest shopman broke into the select society, shiv- 
ered their porphyry sarcophagi, scattered and robbed 
and despoiled, sending away hands, feet, heads, and all 
cherished and sacred jewels and talismans, and now I can 
not distinguish the dust of Amun-neit-gori, or Osirei, or 
Thothmes from the sand of the hills." 

' ' Kings !" scoffed the sun. ' ' Here's a royal shin-bone — 
the shin of a real Theban king. You may buy it for a pound 
to-day, if it were not sold for a shilling yesterday, and for 
a farthing if you'll give no more. The ring in his slave's 
ear in the plebeian tombs is worth a hundred of it." 

Vainly, a thoughtful Theban that lingered almost in- 
visible in the intense light along the defile, suggested to 
the sun, that royalty was never held of the body — that 
monarchs and monarchies were only instruments and insti- 
tutions — that the whole world was a convention, and vir- 
tu-e a draft upon heaven. The sun would gibe his gibe. 

" Ho, ho I kings' shins, going, going ! kings' hands and 
feet, who bids ? Not a para from any of the crowd who 
sell their souls every day to kiss the hands and feet of 
some sort of royalty, the world over. Ho, ho, ho, kings !" 



264 NILE NOTES. 



What a diabolical sun ! He scoffed so fervently that 
the Howadji grew very silent, having previously thought 
it rather a good thing to show a mummy at home, that 
they had found in the kings' tombs at Thebes. But with 
that sun glaring out of the sky, who could dare? So 
they crept very humbly on, deftly defying him and ward- 
ing off sun-strokes with huge, heavy umbrellas of two 
thicknesses of blue cotton, and consequently constantly on 
the point of melting and dripping down the donkeys' sides, 
while the spectral sponge-rock echoed the chirrups of the 
donkey boys mockingly. " Ah ! my young gentlemen travel 
a long way ^o see tombs. But you will have enough of 
them one day, young gentlemen. "What stands at the end 
of all your journeying ?" The abashed Howadji crept still 
silently along, and reached at length the end of the tortuous, 
stony valley, in the heart of the Libyan hills. 

Here was high society. If the field of the cloth of 
gold is famed because two live kings met there, what shall 
this assembly of numberless dead kings, and kings only, 
be ? No squires here, no henchmen or courtiers. Nothing 
but the pure dust here. All around us, the low square 
doors sculptured in the hill bases, open into their presence- 
chambers. Nor any gold stick in waiting, nor lord high 
chamberlain to present us. What democracy so demo- 
cratic as the congregation of dead kings ? Let us descend. 
Even you and I, Pacha, are as good as many dead 
kings. And is not Verde Giovane, himself, equal to x, or 
an unknown quantity of them ? The runaway Mohammad 
who returned penitent at Syene, shall officiate as chamber- 
lain with the torch orate. 



DEAD KINGS. 266 



Now down — but hold ! The kings are not there. They 
are in the Vatican, in the Louvre, in London, at Berlin, at 
Vienna, in choice museums, and scattered undistinguished 
upon the rocks. The master of the house being out, of 
course you will not enter. 

Leave them to museums and histories. What are they' 
to us ? Their tombs, not themselves, are our shrines to- 
day. Ramses' tomb is at this moment of greater moment 
to us than his whole life. Were he sitting now on Mem- 
non'.s pedestal, would the Howadji sacrifice seeing his tomb 
to seeing him ? 

M 



XXXIII. 

The Howadji descended into the tomb. It is the trump 
tomb of the kings' valley, and is named Belzoni, from the 
traveler. The peasants observed the ground sinking at 
this point of the hill, and suggested as much to Dr. Riip- 
pell. But Grermania, though, sure, is slow, and while the 
Doctor whiffed meditative meerschaums over it, Belzoni 
opened it, thereby linking his name with one of the most 
perfect of Theban remains. 

We went perpendicularly down a range of shattered 
stone steps, and entering the tomb, advanced through a pas- 
sage still sloping downward. The walls were covered with 
hieroglyphs fresh as of yesterday. They are a most grace- 
ful ornament in their general impression, although the de- 
tails are always graceless, excepting the figures of birds, 
which in all Egyptian sculptures are singularly life-like. 
In the wall and ceiling painting of these tomb-passages is 
the germ of the arabesques of the Eoman epoch. Here is 
clearly the dawn of the exquisite delicacy of the ceilings 
of the baths of Titus, and the later loveliness of the 
Loggie. Looking at these rude lines, but multitudinous 






BURIED. 267 



and fresh, I saw thei beginnings of what Raphael per- 
fected. 

Still advancing, the Howadji descended steps and 
emerged in a hall. It is small, but the walls are all care- 
fully painted. The G-ods are there, and the heroes — some 
simple epic of heroic life, doubtless, which we do not quite 
understand, although we interpret it very fluently. Other 
chambers and one large hall succeed. In this latter are 
figures of four races upon the central columns, supposed to 
indicate the four colored races of the world. The walls 
and ceilings are all painted with figures of the King Osirei, 
father of Ramses, whose tomb it was, offering gifts to the 
Grods and receiving grace from them. 

These subterranean halls are very solemn. The mind 
perpetually reverts to their host, to the embalmed body 
that was sealed in the sarcophagus as in a rock — sur- 
rounded in night and stillness with this sculptured society 
of earth and heaven. It is hard to realize that these so 
finely finished halls were to be closed forever. Nor were 
they so, for the kings, after three thousand years, were to 
come again upon the earth, and their eyes should first 
light upon the history and the faith of their former life. 
How much of this was pride, how much reverence of roy- 
alty, how much veneration for th^ human body? 

Break a sarcophagus with Cambyses, and ask the ten- 
ant — or mayhap our thoughtful Thebanhas also meditated 
that theme. While you await the answer, we pass into a 
fourth room, and find that death, too enamored of a 
king, did not tarry for the tomb's completion, for here are 



268 NILE NOTES, 



unfinished drawings — completed outlines only and no 
color. 

The effect is finer than that of the finished pictures. 
The boldness and vigor of the lines are full of power. There 
are boats and birds, simple lines only, which we should 
admire to-day upon any canvas. That old Egyptian ar- 
tist was as sure of his hand and eye, as the French ar- 
tist, who cut his pupil's paper with his thumb nail, to in- 
dicate that the line should run so, and not otherwise. The 
coloring is rude and inexpressive. The drawing of the hu- 
man figure conventional, for the church or the priests or- 
dained how the human form should be drawn. Later, the 
church and priests ordained how the human form should 
be governed. Yet, sumptuous scarlet queen, sitting on 
seven hills, you were generous to art, while you were 
wronging nature. 

There was going down dangerous steps afterward, and 
explorations of chambers dim, whose farther end had fallen 
in and shut out investigation. The same song was every- 
where sung in different keys. Three hundred and twenty 
feet we advanced into the earth, and one hundred and 
twenty downward. In that space all the Grods were gath- 
ered, could we have known them, and wondrous histories 
told, could we have heard them. Fresh and fair the walls, 
but the passages and steps were broken, and the darkness 
was intolerably warm and stifling. Students of hiero- 
glyphs, artists, the versed in Egyptian mythology, jackals 
and mummy merchants had longer tarried and increased 
their stores. But the Howadji did what the owner and 



BURIED. 269 



builder of the tomb could not do. They crept out of it, 
and sat down upon the shattered steps of the entrance, to 
smoke peaceful chibouques. 

At the door of this tomb, as of all others, were mummy 
merchants, who gathered round us and outspread their 
wares. Images, necklaces, rings, arms, heads, feet, hands, 
bits of the mummy case, and little jars of seed, charms, 
lamps, all the rich robbery of the tombs, placidly awaited 
inspection. The mummy merchants are the population of 
the Theban ruins. Grrave ghouls, they live upon dead 
bodies. They come out spectrally from columns and walls, 
as if they were the paintings just peeled off, and sit at 
tomb doors like suspicious spirits, and accost you unintel- 
ligibly as you go gaping from wonder to wonder. But are 
grave always, the ghouls, and no shrieking pertinacious 
pedlers. 

"We descended a few doors off, into the Harpers' tomb, 
not that a harper is there buried, but there are two Homeric 
figures drawn upon the walls of a small room, singing 
hymns to the harp, and they give their name to the tomb. 
It belongs by right to Ramses III. But if that sneering 
sun could steal in, he would tell the Howadji that the 
harpers are more interesting, and that Time estimates 
Kings at their value. 

This tomb is a cotemporary daguerreotype of old Egyp- 
tian life — the life of the field, of the river, of the house, of 
art, of religion. Fruits are here, birds, baskets, vases, 
couches, pottery, skins. It is a more vivid and accurate 
chronicle than Herodotus. These figures are drawn in 



270 NILE NOTES. 



small separate chambers, and each kind by itself, as if to 
symbolize the universality of the kings' kingdom and the- 
arts in it. They do not seem pictures of separate scenes, 
as in the private tombs, but, as is proper in royal tombs, 
of the general forms and instruments of Egyptian life. 
Yet what is the knowledge that our princess Re-ni-no-fre 
sat upon a chair like ours, if we know that she was beau- 
tiful and young ? 

For the name's sake we entered the tomb of Memnpn, 
a title of Ramses Y., and because it wa^ the favorite of the 
Greeks. It was easy and pleasant to see why they 
preferred it, because of the symmetry of the arrangement 
and the extreme delicacy, finish and fineness of the paint- 
ings. In the farther chamber is a huge sarcophagus of 
Egyptian porphyry, broken by some invader, and over it 
and on all the ceilings are astronomical enigmas of fine 
color. 

From all these royal tombs the occupants are long since 
departed. Not to heaven and hell but to choice cabinets 
of curiosity, and to the winds whither Cambyses and the 
other invaders incontinently sent them. The significance 
of their much painting is mostly a secret. The sacred 
symbols are too mystic for us moderns. That serpent with 
two men's heads at his tail looking backward— three snake 
heads in their proper places looking forward— two pairs of 
human legs walking different ways, and inexplicable sprouts 
upon his back, is more puzzling than the interior of Africa 
or the name of Charon's boat. Fancy, of course, figures 
magnificent meanings for the unintelligible, and the fair 



k 



BURIED. 2*?! 



daughters of beamy John Bull, did they not explain at 
length those mysteries over the pleasant dinners at Shep- 
herd's ? Yet truth is a simple figure, though fond of 
dress. ■..■■:;•' .^ 

In all the tombs was one G-od, a foxy-headed divinity, 
who greatly charmed us. He was in all societieS| in all 
situations. Grenerally he was tapping a surprised figure 
upon the shoulder, and pricking the fox ears forward, 
saying, like an impertinent conscience, " Attend, if you 
please." Then he sits in the very council of heaven and 
hobnobs with Amun Re, and again farther on, taps another 
victim. Such sleepless pertness was never divine before. 
Yet he is always good-humored, always ready for pot-luck. 
Grods, kings, or Howadji, all is fish to the foxy. He seemed 
the only live thing in the tombs. Much more alive than 
sundry be-goggled and be- vailed male and female Howadji 
who explored with us these realms of royal death. We 
asked the foxy to join us in a sandwich and chibouque in 
the entrance of Memnon's tomb. But he was too busy 
with an individual who seemed not to heed him— and re- 
mained tapping him upon the walls. 

In the late afternoon we crossed the mountains into 
the valley of priestsV tombs. The landscape was lovely 
beyond words, and at sunset from the crumbling Sphinxes 
of El Kurneh we turned toward Memnon as the faithful 
turn to Mecca. The Howadji fleet, mostly English, lay at 
the opposite Luxor shore, gay with flags and streamers, 
and boats with mingled Frank and Muslim freight glided 
across the gleaming river. The huge pylon of Karnak 



2*72 



NILE NOTES. 



towered, like the side of a pyramid, over the palms; and 
in a clumsy tub of a boat, and rowed by a brace of the 
common right angular oars, trimmed boughs of trees, 
we were forced through the rosy calm to our dismantled 
Ibis. 



XXXIX. 

For even Re-ni-no-fre must die and be buried suitably. 
Love and beauty were no more talismans then, than now. 
Death looked on Queens with the evil eye. "What bowels 
of beauty and royalty have not the Libyan hills I AYhat 
Sultan so splendid that he has a hareem so precious ! 

The ladies lie lonefy and apart from their lords. The 
Kings are at one end of the old Libyan suburb — the Queens 
at the other. We approached the Queens' tombs through an 
ascending sand and stone defile. But, as becomes, it is 
not entirely sequestered from the green of the valley, and 
the door of a Queen's tomb framed as fair an Egyptian 
picture as I saw. These tombs are smaller and less im- 
portant than those of the Kings. The kings, who, as at 
Dahr-el-Baree, inserted their cartouches or escutcheons 
over those of their predecessors, and so strove to cheat pos- 
terity, could not suffer their wives to be buried as nobly as 
themselves. 

Yet after the elaboration and mystic figuring and toil- 
ing thought and depth and darkness and weariness of the 
kings' tombs, the smallness and openness of the queens' is 



274 NILE NOTES. 



refreshing. They are mere caves in the rock, usually of 
three or four chambers. The sculptures and paintings are 
gracious and simple. They are not graceful, but suggest 
the grace and repose which the ideal of female life requires. 

Simple landscapes, gardens, fruit and flowers are the 
subjects of the paintings; No bewildering grandeurs of 
human-headed and footed serpents — of Grods inconceivable, 
bearing inexplicable symbols, all which, and the tangled 
mesh of other theological emblems, is merely human. 
But the largeness and simplicity of natural forms, as true 
and touching to us, as to those who painted them. 

This simplicity, which was intended, doubtless, in the 
royal mind, to symbolize the lesser glory of the spouse, is 
now the surpassing beauty of the tombs. In the grace- 
ful largeness and simplicity of the character of the decora- 
tions, it seems as if the secret of reverence for womanly 
ciharacter and influence, which Was to be later revealed, 
was instinctively suggested by those who knew them not. 
Eve was truly created long and long after Adam, and at 
rural "Worcester, they doubt if she be quite completed yet. 
Those wise Egyptian priests knew many things, but knew 
not the best. And the profound difference of modern civil- 
ization from ancient, as the Western from the Eastern, 
what is it but the advent of Eve ? In Cairo and Damas- 
cus, to-day, Adam sits alone with his chibouque and fin- 
gan of mocha ; but his wives, like the dogs and horses of 
the "Western, are excluded from the seats of equality and 
honor. . 

The cheerful yellow hues of the walls, and their expo- 



DEAD QUEENS. 275 



sure to the day, the warm silence of the hill seclusion, and 
the rich luminous landscape in the vista of the steep valley, 
made these tombs pleasant pavilions of memory, "We 
wandered through them refreshed, as in gardens. They 
are all the same, and you will not explore many. But the 
mind digests them easily and at once — while those kings' 
tombs may yet give thought a dyspepsia. 

While the Howadji loitered, ecco mi qua, stood our 
foxy friend upon the bright walls. " Well said, old mole! 
canst work i' the earth so fast?" "Yes," said he, '^ I 
thought I'd step over ; their majesties might be lonely." 

Foxy, Foxy ! I elect thee to my Penates. To thee 
shall an altar be builded, and an arm-chair erected there- 
upon. Thereof shall punch-bowls be the vessels, and fra- 
grant datakia the incense. A model Grod is Foxy, alive, 
active, busy, — looking in at the hareem, too, lest they be 
lonely ! 



XL. 

The mere Theban subjects died, too, and they also had 
to be buried. Their tombs are in the broad face of the 
mountains toward the river, and between those of the 
kings and queens. They command a fairer earthly pros- 
pect than those of their royal masters, and, Osiris favoring, 
their occupants reached the heavenly meads as soon. 

The great hillside is honey-combed with these tombs. 
There is no wonder so wonderful that it shall not be real- 
ized, and the Prophet's coffin shall be miraculous no longer, 
for here the dwellings of the dead overhang the temples 
and the houses. The romantic Theban could not look at 
the sunset, but he must needs see tombs and find the sun- 
set too seriously symbolical. Clearly with the Thebans, 
death was the great end of life. 

The patient little donkeys would have tugged us up the 
steep sand and rock-slope, from the plain of Thebes. But 
we toiled up on foot through a village of dust and barking 
dogs and filthy people inconceivable, and on and higher, 
through mummy swathings, cast off from rifled mummies 
and bleaching bones. If a civilized being lived in modern 



ET CETERA. 211 



Thebes, he would certainly inhabit a tomb for its greater 
cleanliness and comfort, and would find it, too, freshly 
frescoed. 

In the kings' tombs, we encountered the unresolvable 
theological enigmas, with the stately society of Grods and 
heroes. The queens welcomed us in gardens and in barges 
of pleasure, while timbrels and harps rang, and the slaves 
danced along the walls, offering fruit and flowers, — or 
would have done so, had they not rejoined their spouses in 
choice cabinets. 

But the plebeians receive us in the midst of their fields 
and families. The hints of the Harper's tomb are mi- 
nutely developed in many of the private tombs. Every 
trade, and the detail of every process of household econo- 
my — of the chase and all other departments of Theban 
life, are there pictured. Much is gone. The plaster casing 
of the rock peels away. Many are caves only. But in 
some the whole circle of human labor seems to be picto- 
rially completed. 

The social scenes are most interesting. Very graceful 
is a line of guests smelling the lotus offered as a welcome ; 
but times change and manners. Pleasant and graceful 
would it yet be to welcome friends with flowers. But all 
do not dwell upon rivers, neither are the shores of all riv- 
ers lithe with lilies. Haply for modern welcome, a cigar 
and glass of sherry suffice. 

I say graceful, meaning the idea, for upon the walls 
you would see a very stiff row of stiff figures smelling at 
stiff flowers. With your merely modern notions, you 



278 NILE NOTES. 



would probably mistake the lotus for a goblet. Were you 
an artist, you would cherish the i^ea until you carved in 
a cup that graceful flower form. Figures of musicians, 
whose harps and guitars and tambourines would seem to 
you the germs of the tar and the rabab, would awaken vague 
visions of Hecate and the ojd husband. But if you beheld 
the dancers, infallibly you would slide down three thou- 
sand years in a moment, and musily gazing from the door 
into the soft morning, your eyes would yearn toward Esne, 
and even your more severely regulated heart, memory, 
mind, or what you will, toward the gay Grhazeeyah and 
the modest dove. 

These tombs like the rest are tenantless. At intervals 
come the scientific and open new ones. The mummy 
merchants and Howadji follow and seize the spoils. Time 
succeeds and preys, though tenderly, upon the labor of an 
antiquity that has eluded him — ^for he was busy in the 
plain below smoothing the green, grave of Thebes. For the 
tomb of Thebes itself is the freshest and fairest of all. 
The stars come and go in the ceiling. The wheat waves 
and is harvested, flowers spring and fade upon the floor. 
The same processes of life are- not repeated, but they are 
real there. Its tenant too has disappeared like the rest — ■ 
but into no known cabinet. 

"We emerged from the tombs, and clomb down the hill. 
A house of unusual pretension, with a swept little court in 
front, attracted our notice. traveler, heed not the clean 
little court — for the figure that sits therein, amply arrayed, 
sedately smoking as if life were the very vanity of vanities. 



ET CETERA. 279 



is the monarch of mummy merchants, who exacts terrible 
tribute from the Howadji. A Grreek ghoul is he, who 
lives by the living no less than the dead. 

Fix your eye upon Memnon, and follow to the plain. 
Amble quietly in his sunset-shadow to the shore. The air 
will sway with ghosts you can not. lay. Dead Thebans 
from the mountains will glide shadowy over dead Thebes 
in the plain. — Chapless, fallen, forgotten now, we too were 
young immortals — we too were of Arcady ! 



XLI. 

There is a satisfaction in the entire desolation of 
Thebes. It is not a ruin, but a disappearance. The 
Libyan suburb, which seems to have been all tombs and 
temples, is now only a broad and deep green plain ending 
suddenly in the desert at the foot of the mountains. 
Thereon Memnon and his mate, the Memnonium arid 
Medeenet Haboo, are alone conspicuous. Exploration re- 
veals a few other temples and some mighty statues, which, 
as they lie broken at Titan length — their sharp outlines 
lost by the constant attrition of the sand, seem to be 
returning into rock. 

This plain, making a green point in the river, is by far 
the most striking situation for a city. Yet we see it, 
deducting the few ruins, as men lost in the past saw it. 
Nor shall the American whose history is but born — stand 
upon this plain of Thebes which has outlived its history, 
without a new respect for our mother earth who can so 
deftly destroy, sand-grain by sand-grain, the most stupen- 
dous human works. 

Step westward and behold a prairie. Consider the 



THE MEMNONIUM. 281 

beginnings of a world metropolis there — its culmination in 
monuments of art — its lingering decay and desolation 
until its billowy, tumultuous life is again smoothed into a 
flowery prairie. With what yearning wonder would the 
modern who saw it turn to us, lost in antiquity. Then 
step eastward and behold Thebes. 

The Memnonium is not the remains of the temple 
before which Memnon sat. It was a temple-palace of 
Ramses the Grreat. It is a group of columns now with 
fallen and falling pylons, a few hundred rods from Mem- 
non. You will find it one of the pleasantest ruins, for the 
rude, historical sculptures are well nigh erased. There 
are no dark chambers, no intricacy of elaborate construc- 
tion to consider, and the lotus-capitaled columns are the 
most graceful I saw. 

We must be tolerant of these Egyptian historical 
sculptures upon pylons and temple walls for the sake of 
history and science. But the devotee of art and beauty 
will confess a secret comfort in the Memnoniurn, where 
the details are fast crumbling, and the grandeur of the 
architecture stands unencumbered. Here is an architec- 
ture perfect in its grand style in any age. Yet on the 
truly rounded columns, palm-like below and opening in a 
lotus cup to bear the architrave, are sculptures of a 
ludicrous infancy of art. It is hard to feel that both were 
done by the same people. Had they then no feeling of 
symmetry and propriety ? It is as if the Chinese had 
sculptured the walls of St. Peter's or the Vatican. 

In the midst of the Memnonium, lies the shattered 



282 NILE K GTE S: 



Colossus of Eamses— a mass of granite equal to tiiat of 
Memnon. How it was overthrown and how broken will 
never be known. It is comfortable to be certain of one 
thing in the bewildering wilderness of ruin and conjecture, 
evenif it be only ignorance, Cambyses, the unlucky Persian, 
is here the scapegoat, as he is of Memnpn's misfortune and 
of Theban ruin in general. " Cambyses or an earthquake," 
insists untiring antiquarian speculation, clearly wishing it 
maybe Cambyses. An earthquake, then, and Oh! pax! 

This Colossus sat at the temple gate. His hands lay 
upon his knees and his eyes looked eastward. And even 
the tumbled mass is yet serene and dignified. Is art so 
near to nature that the statue of greatness caii no more 
lose its character than greatness itself ? 

Behind the statue was a court surrounded with Osiride 
columns, and a few shattered ones remain. I fancy the 
repose of that court in a Theban sunset, the windless 
stillness of the air and cloudlessness of the sky. The 
King enters, thoughtfully pacing by the calm-browed statue, 
that seems the sentinel of heaven. In the presence of the 
majestic columns humanly carved, their hands sedately 
folded upon their breasts — ^his weary soul is bathed with 
peace, as a weary body with living water. 

Ramses' battles and victories are sculptured upon the 
walls^his offerings to the Grods and their reception of him. 
There is an amusing discrepancy between the decay and 
disappearance of these, and the descriptions in Sir G-ardiner. 
Spirited word-paintings of battle-scenes, and scenes celes- 
tial, or even animated descriptions of them, are ludicrously 



THE MEMNONIUM. 283 



criticized by their subj ects. That, too, ig pleasant to the 
Howadji, who discovers very rapidly what his work in the 
Memnonium is ; and stretched in the shadow of the most 
graceful column, while Nero silently pencils its flower- 
formed capital in her sketch-book, he looks down the vistas 
and beyond them, to Memnon, who for three thousand 
years and more has sat almost near enough to throw his 
shadow, upon this temple, yet has never turned to see it. 
. There sat the Howadji many still hours, looking now 
southward to Memnon, now eastward to gray Karnak over 
the distant palms. Perchance in that corridor of columns, 
Memnon and the setting sun their teachers, the moments 
were no more lost than by young Greek immortals in the 
porch of the philosophers. Yet here can be slight record 
of those hours. The flowers of sunset dreams are too 
frail for the Herbarium. 

There dozed the donkeys, too, dreaming of pastures 
incredible, whither hectoring Howadji come no more. 
Donkeys ! are there no wise asses among you, to bid you 
beware of dreaming?; For we come down upon your 
backs, like stern realities upon young Poets, and urge you 
across the plain to Medeenet Haboo. 

Ah! had you and the young poets but heeded the wise 



XLII. 

Mtlttutl Sulinn. 

Wonderful are the sculptures of Medeenet Haboo — a 
palace-temple of Ramses III. They are cut three or four 
inches deep into the solid stone, and gazing at them, and 
in a little square tower called the pavilion, trying to find 
on the walls what Sir Grardiner and Poet Harriet say is 
there, you stumble on over sand heaps and ruin, and enter 
at length the great court. 

The grave grandeur of this court is unsurpassed in 
architecture — open to the sky above, a double range of 
massive columns supported the massive pediment. The 
columns upon the court were Osiride — ^huge, square masses 
with the figures with the folded hands carved in bold relief 
upon their faces, and carved all over with hieroglyphs. 
The rear row was of circular columns, with papyrus or 
lotus capitals. The walls, dim seen behind the double 
colonnade, are all carved with history, and the figures upon 
them, with those of the architraves, variously colored. 

It is solemn and sublime. — The mosaic, finical effect 
of so much carving and coloring is neutralized by the 
grandeur and mass of the columns. In its prime, when 



MEDEENET HABOO. 285 

the tints were fresh, although the edges of the sculptures 
could never have been sharper than now, the priests of 
Medeenet Haboo were lodged as are no modern monarchs. 

Time and Cambyses have been here too, and, alas ! 
the Christians, the Coptic Christians, who have defiled 
many of the noblest Egyptian remains, plastering their 
paintings, building miserable mud cabins of churches in 
their courts, with no more feeling and veneration than the 
popes who surmount obelisks with the cross. I grant the 
ruined temples offered material too valuable to be left 
through regard to modern sentiment, and curiosity of 
Egyptian history and art. It is true, also, that the Chris- 
tian plastering did preserve many of the pagan paintings. 
But you will grant that man, and especially the Howadji 
species, has a right to rail at all defiling and defilers of 
beauty and grandeur. Has not the name Groth passed into 
a proverb ? Yet were the Goths a vigorous, manly race, 
with a whole modern world in their loins, who came and 
crushed an effete people. 

But enough for the Copts. 

They erected a church in the great court of Medee- 
net Haboo, piercing the architrave all round for their 
rafters, instead of roofing the court itself. Nor let the 
faithful complain of the presence of pagan symbols. For 
the Copts and early Egyptian Christians had often the 
pagan images and pictures over their altars. Nay, does 
not Catholic Christendom kiss to-day the great toe of Ju- 
piter Olympans, with religious refreshment ? 

Now the Coptic columns of red sandstone encumber 



286 NILE NOTES. 



this noble court and lie leveled, poor pigmies, amid the 
Titanic magnificence of the standing or fallen original 
colurnns. The Christian columns are about the size and 
appearance of those in the San Spirito, at Florence. Be- 
nign Brunellesco, forgive, but the architecture of modern 
Europe is sternly criticized by this antique African court. 

The Howadji sat upon a fragment of ruin, and the 
graybeard guide, Vv^ho happily could not speak ten words 
of English, lighted their chibouques. Then he withdrew 
himself behind a prostrate column, seeing that they wished 
to be still, and lay there motionless, like Time sleeping at 
his task. The donkey-boys spoke only in low whispers, 
curiously watching the Howadji, and the dozy donkeys 
with closing eyes, shook their significant ears, and- shifted 
slowly from sun to shade. The musing, dreamy chibou- 
que is, after all, the choicest companion for these ruins. 
Chibouques and dozy donkeys, a sleeping old man, and 
low whispering boys, scare not the spirits that haunt these 
courts. Time too, you will muse, smokes his chibouque 
as he lies at leisure length along the world.. Puff", puff* — 
he whiffs away creeds, races, histories, and the fairest 
fames flee like vapors from his pipe. India, Egypt, G-reece, 
wreathing azurely away in the sunshine. Smoke, smoke, all 

Pace with Sir G-ardiner along the walls, if you will, 
and behold the triumphal processions, deifications, battles 
and glories, terrestrial and celestial, of the third Ramses. 
They are curious, and worth your while. It is well to see 
and know men's various ways in various ages of slaughter- 
ing each other, and glorifying themselves. 



MEDEENET HABOO. 287 

But in all this detail love it not too mucli. In these 
temple remains, in the nectar of Egyptian wisdom, as 
Plato and the old wise pour it to us in their vases of won- 
drous work, have we our heritage of that race. Spare us 
the inventory of their wardrobes and the bulletins of their 
battles. In history it is not men's features, but the grand 
effect and impression of the men that we want. Not how 
they did it, but what they did. Ramses marched to Bab- 
ylon. Cambyses came to Thebes. Quits for them. Cam- 
byses upset Memnon. That is the great thing, and if 
thereupon near-sighted wonder will see stars in a mill- 
stone, we will be thankful for astronomy's sake, and 
awaken old Time there to refill the chibouques. 

For in this magnificent seclusion must we linger and 
linger. The setting sun warns us away, but in leaving, 
this evening, we leave the Libyan suburb forever, nor even 
the morrow with Karnak can paralyze the pang of parting. 

It is only here, too — here in the warm dead heart of 
Egypt, that the traveler can see ruins as time has made 
and is making them. Thebes is not yet put in order for 
visitors. The rubbish of the ruined huts of the Chris- 
tian settlement within and about this pile yet remains. 
The desert has drifted around it, so that many noble col- 
umns are buried in dust to their capitals. The chambers 
of the temple are entirely earthed. We climb a sand-hill 
from the court to the roof of the temple. Far down in fis- 
sures of rubbish are bits of sculptured wall, and upon the 
same dust-mountain we descend to view the historical 
sculptures of the outer wall. 



288 NILE NOTES. 



This deepens the reality and solemnity of the impres- 
sion. Were it all excavated, and the whole temple cleared 
and revealed, it were a glorious gain for art and science. 
But to the mere traveler — if one may be a mere traveler — 
the dust-buried chambers solemnize the court. If the head 
and unutterable neck of Isis are revealed, wonder for the 
rest is more worshipful than sight. 

Besides, excavation implies Cioerones and swarms of 
romantic travelers in the way of each other's romance. 
You will remember, Xtopher, how fatal to sentiment was 
a simple English " good evening," in the moonlighted Ro- 
man forum. Imagination craved only salutations after 
the high Roman fashion, and when Lydia Languish did 
not find the Coliseum so '''•funny''' as Naples, you regretted 
the facilities of steam, and yearned to pace that pavement 
alone with the ghosts of Csesar and Marc Antony. Haste 
to Egypt, Xtopher, and that Roman wish shall be ful- 
filled, for you shall walk erect and alone with Persian 
Cambyses or mild-eyed Herodotus or inscrutable Ramses 
— for ''there is every man his own fool, and the world's 
sign is taken down." 

Excavation implies arrangement, and the sense of 
Time's work upon a temple or a statue, or even a human 
face, is lost or sadly blunted, when all the chips are swept 
away, and his dusty, rubbishy workshop is smoothed into a 
saloon of sentiment. Who ever entered for the first time 
the Coliseum, without a fall to zero in the mercury of en- 
thusiasm, at the sight of the well-sanded area, the cross, 
shrines and sentinels ? When it is not enough that Science 



MEDEENET HABOO. 289 

and Romance carry away specimens of famous places to 
their museums, but Mammon undertakes the making of 
the famous place itself into a choice cabinet, they may be 
esteemed happy who flourished prior to that period. 

And it is pleasant to see remains so surpassingly re- 
markable, without having them shown by a seedy-coated, 
bad-hatted fellow-creature at five francs a day. You climb 
alone to Aboo Simbel in that serene Southern silence, and 
half fear to enter the awful presence of the Osiride col- 
umns, or to penetrate into the Adyta, mysterious to you 
as to those of old, and you donkey quietly with a taciturn 
old Time over the plain of green young grain, where Thebes 
was, and feel as freshly as the first who saw it. 

But these things will come. Egypt must soon be the 
flivorite ground of the modern Nimrod, Travel — who so 
tirelessly hunts antiquity. After Egypt, other lands and 
ruins are young and scant and tame, save the Parthenon 
and Pestum. Every thing invites the world hither. 

It will come, and Thebes will be cleaned up and fenced 
in. Steamers will leave for the cataract, where donkeys 
will be in readiness to convey parties to Philse, at seven 
A. M. precisely, touching at Esne and Edfoo. Upon the Li- 
byan suburb will arise the Hotel royal au Ramses le grand 
for the selectest fashion. There will be the Hotel de Mem- 
non for the romantic, the Hdtel aux Tombeaux for the rev- 
erend clergy, and the Pension Re-ni-no-fre upon the water- 
side for the invalides and sentimental — only these names 
will then be English, for France is a star eclipsed in the 
East. 



290 NILE NOTES. 



But before the world arrives, live awhile in the loneli- 
ness of the Theban temples and tombs with no other so- 
ciety than Memnon, and the taciturn old Time, and the 
chibouque. You will seem then, not to have traveled in 
vain, but to have arrived somewhere. Here you will 
realize what you have read and thought you believed, that 
the past was alive. The great vague phantom that goes 
ever before us will pause here, and turning, look at you 
with human features, and speak a language sweet and 
solemn and strange, though unintelligible. 

You, too, will linger and linger, though the sunset 
warn you away. You, too, will tarry for the priests in 
the court of Medeenet Haboo, and listen for the voice of 
Memnon. You, too, will be glad that the temples are as 
time left them, and that man has only wondered, not 
worked, at them. You, too, will leave lingeringly the Li- 
byan suburb, and own to Osiris in your heart, that if the 
young gods are glorious, the old gods were great. 



XLIII. 

Karnak antedates coherent history, yet it was older the 
day we saw it than ever before. All thought and poetry 
inspired by its antiquity, had richer reason that day than 
when they were recorded, and so you, meditative reader^ 
will have the advantage of this chapter, when you stand 
in Karnak. Older than history, yet fresh, as if just ruined 
for the romantic. 

The stonies of the fallen walls are as sharply-edged as 
the hammer left them. They lie in huge heaps or sepa- 
rately standing in the sand, and regarding the freshness, 
you would say that Cambyses and his Persians had 
marched upon Memphis only last week, while the adhe- 
rents of the earthquake theory of Egyptian ruin, might 
fancy they yet felt the dying throes of the convulsion that 
had shattered these walls. 

This freshness is startling. It is sublime. Embalm- 
ing these temples in her amber air, has not Nature so 
hinted the preservation of their builders' bodies ? Was the 
world so enamored of its eldest born, that it could not suf- 
fer even the forms of his races and their works to decay ? 



292 NILE NOTES. 



And, mild-eyed Isis ! how beautiful are the balances 
of nature ! In climates where damp and frost crack and 
corrode, she cherishes with fair adorning the briefer decay. 
Italy had greenly graced Karnak with foliage. Vines had 
there clustered and clambered caressingly around these 
columns, in graceful tendrils wreathing away into the 
blue air its massive grace. Flowery grass had carpeted 
the courts, and close-clinging moss shed a bloom along the 
walls to the distant eye of hope or memory. 

Haply it had been dearer so to the painter and the 
poet. But this death that does not decay is awful. On 
the edge of the desert, fronting the level green that spreads 
velvet before it to the river, Karnak scorns time, earth- 
quakes, Cambyses, and Lathyrus, yes, and scorns also, ro- 
mantic disappointment. For it is not the most interesting 
or pleasing of Egyptian remains. It is austere and ter- 
rible, and sure to disappoint the romance that seeks in 
ruins bowers of sentiment. Let the Misses Vorde remem- 
ber that, when they consider the propriety of visiting Kar- 
nak. Per ad venture, also, they will there discover hiero- 
glyphs more inexplicable than those of Theban tombs. 
P "When Thebes was Thebes, an avenue of ram-headed 
sphinxes connected Karnak with Luxor. Imagination in- 
dulges visions of Ramses the Grreat, superb Sesostris, or the 
philosophical Ptolemies, going in state along this avenue, 
passing from glory to glory — -possibly a statelier spectacle 
than the royal going to open parliament. Brightly that 
picture would have illuminated these pages. But reality, 
our coldest critic, requires cooler coloring from us. 



KARNAK. 293 



It was a bright February morning that we donkeyed 
placidly from ruined Luxor to ruined Thebes. The Pacha 
bestrode a beast that did honor to the spirit of his species. 
But my brute, although large and comely, seemed only a f^ 
stuffed specimen of a donkey. Stiffness and clumsiness \ 
were his points. A very gadfly of a donkey-boy, his head 
somewhere about my donkey's knees, piloted our way and 
filled our sails — -namely, battered the animals' backs. But 
vainly with a sharpened stick he stung my insensible beast. 
Only a miserable, perpendicular motion ensued, a very 
little of which had rendered beneficent Halsted superfluous 
to a dyspeptic world. 

Yet somehow we shambled up the sand from the boat, 
and passing through the bazaar of Luxor, entered upon 
the plain. A dusty, donkey path, through clumps of hilfeh 
grass and sand patches, is all that remains of that Sphinx 
avenue. "We scented sphinxes all the way, a mile and a 
half, but unearthed no quarry until within a few rods of 
the Pylon. Nero told me afterward, that we had missed 
the Sphinx avenue, which I believed, for Nero was vera- 
cious and my friend. But, generally, the Howadji must 
reject all such stories. Not only in Egypt, but wherever 
you wander, if some owl has peered into a hole that 
you passed by, and he discovers the oversight, you are ap- 
prised that you had done better not to come at all, rather 
than miss the dark hole. But we passed along a range of } 
headless, ruined sphinxes, that were ram-headed once, and 1 
reached the southern Pylon. It stands alone — a simple, ] 
sculptured gateway. Behind it, is a small temple of Ptole- 



294 NILE NOTES, 



maio days, partly, but yet a portion of the great temple, 
and we climb its roof to survey the waste of Karnak. 

The vague disappointment was natural, it was inevi- 
table. It was that of entering St. Peter's and finding that 
you can see the end. Things so famous pass into ideal 
proportions. " In heaven, another heaven," sings Schiller, 
of St. Peter's dome. But if Schiller had looked from 
Monte Mario upon Home ! It is a disappointment quite 
distinct from the real character of the object, whose great- 
ness presently compels you to realize how great it is. It 
is simply the sudden contact of the real with the ideal. 

For who ever saw the Coliseum or the Apollo ? And when 
deep in the mountainous heart of Sicily, the Howadji saw, 
green and gentle, the vale of Enna — did he see the garden 
whence Pluto plucked his fairest flower? A Coliseum 
and an Apollo, enough have seen. But the impossible 
grandeur and grace of the anticipation are the glow of 
the ideal — the outline of angels alone. All the vagueness 
and vastness of Egyptian musing in our minds invest 
Karnak with their own illimitability, and gather around it 
as the type and complete embodiment of that idea. We 
go forth to behold the tower of Babel, and in ruins, it must 
yet pierce the heavens. 

Ah ! insatiable soul, Mont Blanc was not lofty enough, 
nor the Yenus fair, yet you had hopes of Karnak ! Try 
Baalbec now, and Dhawnlegiri, sky-scaling peak of the 
Himalaya. 

Karnak was an aggregation of temples. Orsitasen's 
cartouche is found there, the first monarch that is dis- 



KARNAK. 295 



tinctly visible in Egyptian history, and Cleopatra's — the 
last of the long, long line. Every monarch added a pylon, 
a court or a colonnade, ambitious each to link his name 
with the magnificence that must outlive them all, and so 
leave the Cartouche of Egypt forever in bold relief upon 
the earth. 

The great temple fronted the river westward. We 
are at the south. The ieye follows the line of the great 
central building, the nucleus of all the rest, backward to 
the desert. It is lost then in the masses of sand, buried 
foundations, and prostrate walls which surround it. Sepa- 
rate pylons fronting the four winds, stand shattered and 
submerged. Sharply two obelisks pierce the blue air. 
The northern gateway stands lofty and alone, its neighbor- 
ing walls leveled and buried. The eastern gate toward 
the desert was never completed, it is only half covered 
with sculptures. The blank death of the desert lies gray 
beyond it. Karnak has grim delight in that neighboring 
grimness. 

From each gate but that desert one, stretched an av- 
enue of sphinxes — southward to Luxor, northward to a 
raised platform on the hills, westward to the river. Thd 
fragments yet remain. Yet here, too, is that strange dis- 
crepancy in taste and sense of grandeur, which strikes the 
eye in the temple sculptures compared in character with the 
architecture. These avenues are narrow lanes of crowded 
sphinxes, spoiling their own impression. The eye and 
mind demand a splendid spaciousness of approach. They 
are shocked at the meanness of the reality, and recognize 



296 NILE NOTES. 



the same inconstant and untrue instinct that built blank 
walls before noble colonnades. Perhaps they were mat- 
ters of necessity. Let the artistic Howadji hope they were. 

Immediately in front of the great pylon is the green 
Nile plain. But sand-drifts lie heaped around the court 
of the temple. Patches of coarse hilfeh grass are the only 
vegetation, and a lonely little lake of blue water sleeps 
cold in the sun, leafless and waveless as a mountain tarn. 

Bare and imposing is this vast area of desolation. But 
the eye shrinks from its severity, and craves grace and pic- 
turesqueness. The heights command always the sad, wide 
prospects. Thither men climb and look wistfully at the 
dim horizon of humanity, even dreaming, sometimes, that 
they see beyond. But they are the melancholy men, who 
live high in watch-towers of any kind. Loftily are they 
lifted upon the architecture of thought, but love swoops 
upward on rainbow pinions, and is lost in the sun. The 
relevance, testy Gunning ? Simply that picturesqueness 
is more satisfactory than sublimity. So through the great 
western gateway, across a court with one solitary column 
erect over its fallen peers, which lie their length, shattered 
from their bases in regular rows, as if they had been piles 
of millstones carefully upset, we enter the great hall of 
Karnak. Shall I say, the grandest ruin of the world ? 

For this is truly Karnak. Here your heart will bow 
in reverence, and pay homage to the justice of this fame. 
A solemn Druidical forest shaped in stone and flowering 
with the colored sculptured forms of dead heroes, and a 
history complete. Not so graceful as the columned grove 



KARNAK. 297 



of the Memnoiiium, but grand and solemn, and majestio 
inconceivably. 

Through the vast vistas the eye can not steal out to 
the horizon, or catch gladly the waving of green boughs. 
Only above, through the open spaces of the architrave, it 
sees the cloudless sky, and the ear hears the singing of un- 
seen birds. 

"Is it not strange, I never saw the sun?" So seems 
the song of birds never to have been heard until its sweet- 
ness was contrasted with the sublime, solemn silence of 
Karnak. 

Here, could you choose of all men your companion, 
you would call Michel Angelo, and then step out and leave 
him alone. For it is easy to summon spirits, but hard to 
keep them company. And a man could better bear the 
imposing majesty of Karnak, than the searching sadness 
>of the artist's eye. In the valley of the Nile, Michel An- 
gelo would have felt that great artists unknown, saw with 
their eyes in their way, the form of the grandeur he sought. 
In Memnon, in the great hall of Karnak, distorted as 
through clouds and mists, yet not all unshaped, he would 
have seen that an ideal as grand was worshiped, nor have 
grieved that it was called by another name. His eye, too, 
would have wandered delighted over the mingled sweet- 
ness and severity of the Egyptian landscape, vast and silent, 
and sun-steeped as the inner realm in which he lived. 

Failing Michel Angelo, there were other figures in the 
hall. Sundry vailed specters were sketching the unsketch- 
able. Plaid pantaloons and turbaned wide-awakes flitted 



298 NILE N^OTES. 



among the figures of gods and heroes. I saw a man with 
a callotype investing Karnak. Nimrod has mounted — 
tally-ho ! 

Nor fear a jest in Karnak, nor sup^iose a ringing laugh 
can destroy this silence. We speak, and the stillness rip- 
ples around the sound, and swallows it as tracelessly as 
mid ocean a stone. Nor because Karnak is solemn, sup- 
pose that we must be sentimental. The Howadji sat upon 
a sloping stone, and eat sardine sandwiches, desserting with 
dates and the chibouque, and the holy of holies was not 
less holy, nor the grandeur less grand. 

In the afternoon we wandered over the whole wilder- 
ness of ruin, studying the sculptures, deciphering the car- 
touches, stumbling and sliding in the sand down to tem- 
ples whose colored architraves showed level with the 
ground, so deeply were they buried. For travel and 
opportunity have their duties. But we returned to the 
great hail, as thought always will return to it, from grub- 
bing in the wondrous waste of Egypt, and at sunset as- 
cended the great pylon and looked across the river west- 
ward, to the Libyan suburb. 

The Howadji returned the next day to Karnak, and 
the next. A golden sunset streamed through it as they 
were finally departing. In the tenderness of its serene 
beauty, Karnak became beautiful, too. The colors upon 
the architraves and columns shone more deeply, and a 
rainbow-radiance permeated the solemn hall. Nimrod was 
coursing through the Libyan suburb. Grlowingly golden 
ranged the level grain, rank on rank, to the river. The 



KARJfAK. 299 



birds gushed with their swift, sweet, sunset songs. How 
young, how shadowy were we, in that austere antiquity ! 
Was it compassion that unbent its awful gravity ? 

No, gadfly ! stinging my perpendicular trotting insen- 
sibility. Souls like ours conceived, hands like ours fash- 
ioned, this awful Karnak. Never succumb to Karnak, 
gadfly ! Man shaped the desert into this divinity. Pyg- 
malion carved the statue that smote his soul with love. 



XLIV. 

f rtmitig. 

A SACRIFICIAL sheep stood in the starlight on the short 
at Luxor. The golden-sleeved Commander was profoundly 
religious, and proposed to hold a sacred feast of sheep — 
*' a swarry of biled mutton," as later poets have it — 
upon his return to Cairo. The victim was put below, the 
crew rose from squatting on the shore and came aboard, 
and with plaintive songs and beating oars we drifted down 
the river once more, and watched the dim Theban moun- 
tains melt slowly away into invisibility. 

You fancy the Nile voyage is a luxury of languid re- 
pose — a tropical trance. There the warm winds lave groves 
forever green, of which, shivering in our wintry palaces, 
we dream. Stealing swiftly over the Mediterranean, you 
would, swallow-like, follow the summer, and shuffling off 
the coil of care at Cairo, would southward sail to the 
Equator, happiness, and Mountains of the Moon. 

Well, single days are that delight, and to me, the whole 
voyage, but possibly not to you. A diamond-decked dam- 
sel is not a single jewel, although haply to the distant eye 
she brilliantfy blaze like a star. Therefore to the distance 



PRUNING. 301 



of hope and memory will the Nile wear its best hue. Nor 
will we quarrel. To hope, all things are forgiven. Let us 
pardon memory that it remembers like a lover. 

It is hard to believe in winds under a cloudless sky, or 
to feel chilly when the sun shines brightly. The mind 
can not readily separate the climate from the character of 
the land. We never fancy gales in churchyards, only sad 
twilight breaths, and Egypt being a tomb, to imagination, 
how should there be windy weather ? 

A tomb — but a temple. From the minareted mosques 
of Cairo you descend into it, and well believe that the 
back door opens into heaven. The river is its broad, 
winding avenue. The glaring mountains its walls, the 
serene sky its dome. On either hand as you advance is 
the way sculptured with green grain and palms of peace, 
as in those Theban tombs. And more splendid are the 
niches of the dead here, than the palaces of the living — 
Karnak, the Memnonium, Kum Ombos, Aboo Simbel. 
Grhosts are their tenants now — Champollion, Lepsius, and 
Sir Grardiner the tireless Old Mortalities that chisel their 
fading characters. 

Here are enough buried to populate the world. The 
priests told Herodotus a succession of more than three 
hundred kings. The thought bores antiquity like an Arte- 
sian well. The Howadji looks upon Ramses as a modern, 
and grudges him that name of great. He appears every- 
where. From the pyramids to Aboo Simbel, in all the best 
places of the best remains, his cartouche is carved. Why 
was he great ? What do we know, who call him so, but 



302 NILE NOTES. 



the fact of his being a conqueror and a builder of temples 
with the captives he caught, to sculpture the walls with 
the story of their own defeat ? 

Tamerlane the Grreat, tickles the ear as well. Vain he 
clearly was, and enterprising. Let his greatness be proved. 
Ah ! had we been Athenians, should we not have black- 
balled the bejusted Aristides ? 

When you descend into this tomb so stately, the West- 
ern world recedes, and you hear of it no more, and wonder 
only how easily you can accustom yourself to know noth- 
ing that happens in the world. The sleep of Egypt steals 
into your soul. Here, to apprise you of cotemporary af- 
fairs, roars no thunderous " Times, ''^ no eclectic " Galigna- 
ni^^ reaches, speaking all sentiments and espousing- none. 
No safe " Debats^'^ is here. No rocket-sparkling " Presse.^^ 
No heavy-freighted '' Allgemeine Zeitung'^ lumbers along 
this way, making a canal of the Nile. On this golden air 
float no yearling Italian leaves gracefully traced with 
dream-lines of liberty. How much less any " HeraW hot 
with special expresses from Grim Tartary, or thoughtful 
'' Tribune^'' obviating the obliquity of the earth's axis. 

You take your last draught of news at Cairo, and are 
the devotee of the old till your return. Knowing all this, 
how can the traveler, much more the anti-rolling-stone 
partisans, who read of sunshine in the glow of Liverpool 
or anthracite, imagine wind in Egypt ? Wind ! type of 
active life in that death silence ! No, no, say you, hie to 
Egypt, and be still and warm. 

Still? Why, the wild winds pace up and down the 



PRUNING. 303 



valley of the Nile, like his mad hounds howling for Acteon, 
like all the ghosts of all the three hundred dynasties an- 
terior to history, demanding to live again. Ally of the 
desert, the wind whirls the sand into columns and clouds 
that sweep athwart the eternal smile of the sky and sink, 
death-dealing, upon the plain. It smites the palms, and 
as they stretch straight their flexile limbs, utterly con- 
sumes their grace. It tortures the river into a foamy, bil- 
lowy swell, and the soul of the be- vailed, begoggled travel- 
er into rage and despair. Unless, indeed, it favor his 
course. Then all is forgiven. Even the loss of the calm, 
which the character of the land requires, is forgiven, for 
he fancies windless days returning, and dreamy drifting 
upon the stream. 

So did we. Grlad when the Ibis fled with full wings, 
we prophesied the peace of our return, and the gentle 
gliding before southerly winds. Yet the wind that blew us 
from Asyoot to Aboo Simbel, did not end its voyage with 
ours. As we returned, the northerly wind blew for a 
month, luUing a little now and then, even at times yield- 
ing to the south. But no sooner were we upon our way, 
than it was off with us. Sometimes it slept with us 
at night, but infallibly rose before we did at morning. 
" Dream-life," said Nero, at Thebes, deciphering a Grreek 
inscription on Memnon's shin. '^ What with sketching, 
shooting, reading, writing, and all in this inexorable wind, 
a pretty dream-life I find it." There are the poets again, 
guilty of another count ! 

Warm ? Why, the Howadji sat more voluminously 



304 NILE NOTES. 



swathed in coats, cloaks, and shawls, than a mummy in 
his spiced bandages. They began bravely, with sitting in 
front of the cabin and warmly wrapped in winter clothes, 
and only a little chilly, played that it was summer, and 
conversed in a feeble, poetic way of the Egyptian climate. 
Gradually they retreated to the divans in the cabin, and 
cursed the cold. I was sure that a blue fleet of icebergs 
had undertaken the Nile voyage, and were coming up be- 
hind us. I knew that we should meet white bear for 
hippopotami, walruses for crocodiles, and the north pole 
for the equator. Why not push on and find Sir John 
Franklin ! 

So the wind and cold hovered, awful, upon the edges of 
dreaming. Southward, southward, no hope but the Tropic, 
and we entered the Tropic one chilly morning that would 
not let me think of Mungo Park, but only of Captain 
Parry. — 

cow-horned Isis, and thou. Western Athor, forgive, 
that so far this pen could go, so much treason trace, to the 
eternal warm repose of your land. Yet only by a force 
that compelled exaggeration could it be induced. The 
book is closed now, the daguerreotype of those days. Egypt 
is given to the past, and memory shows it windless as a 
picture. There it lies golden-shored in eternal summer. 
I confess it now ; Egypt is that dream-land, that tropical 
trance. There lingers the fadeless green, of which, shiver- 
ing in our white wintry palaces, we dream. The howling 
ghosts are laid ; those wild winds have all blown them- 
selves away ; that fleet of icebergs has joined the Span- 



PRUNING. 305 



ish armada. The Nile does not lead to the North West 
Passage, nor is Mungo Park a myth. 

Memory is the magician. She cuts the fangs from the 
snakes that stung the past, and wreaths them, rainbow 
garlands, around its paling brows. The evil days are not 
remembered. Time, as a purging wind, blows them like 
dead leaves away, as winds winnow the woods in autumn 



XLV. 

For the dream-days dawn, lotus-eating days of faith 
in the Poets as the only practical people, because all the 
world is poetry — of capitulation to Bishop Berkeley, and con- 
fession that only we exist, and the rest is sheer seeming — 
when thought is arduous, and reading wasteful, and the 
smoke of the chibouque scarcely aerial enough — days that 
dissolve the world in light. The azure air and azure 
water mingle. We float in rosy radiance through which 
waves the shore — a tremulous opacity. 

In the Arabian Night days of life, come hauntingly 
vague desires to make the long India voyage. The pleas- 
ant hiatus in actual life — the musing monotony of the day 
— the freedom of the imagination on a calm sea, under a 
cloudless sky — the' far floatings before trade-winds — the 
strange shores embowered with tropical luxuriance, and an 
exhaustless realm of new experience, are the forms and 
fascination of that longing. 

But the Nile more fairly realizes that dream- voyage. 
The blank monotony of sea and sky, is relieved here by the 
tranquil, ever- varying, graceful shores, the constant pan- 



PER CONTRA. 30V 



orama of a life new to the eye, oldest to the mind, and as- 
sociations unique in history. The palms, the desert, the 
fair fertility of unfading fields, mosques, minarets, camels, 
the broad beauty of the tranced river, — these unsphere us, 
were there no Thebes, no Sphinx, no Memnon, Pyramids 
or Karnak, no simple traditions of Scripture, and wild 
A^rabian romances — the sweetest stories of our reading. 

In the early morning, flocks of water-birds are ranged 
along the river — herons, kingfishers, flamingoes, ducks, 
ibis — a motley multitude in the shadow of the high, clay 
banks, or on the low, sandy strips. They spread languid 
wings, and sail snowily away. The sun strikes them into 
splendor. They float and fade, and are lost in the bril- 
liance of the sky. Under the sharp, high rocks, at the 
doors of their cliff*-retreats, sit sagely the cormorants, and 
meditate the passing Hovvadji. Like larger birds reposing, 
shine the sharp sails of boats near or far. Their images 
strike deep into the water and tremble away. 

Then come the girls and women to the water-side, 
bearing jars upon their heads. On the summit of the bank 
they walk erect and stately, profile-drawn against the sky 
Bending and plashing, and playing in the water, with 
little jets of laugh that would brightly flash, if we could 
see them, they fill their jars, and in a long file recede and 
disappear among the palms. Over the brown mud villages 
the pigeons coo and fly, and hang by hundreds upon the 
clumsy towers built for tliem, and a long pause of sun and 
silence follows. 

Presently turbaned Abraham with flowing garment 



308 NILE NOTES. 



and snowy beard, leaning upon his staff, passes with Sarah 
along the green path on the river's edge toward Memphis 
and King Pharaoh. On the opposite desert lingers Hagar 
with Ishmael, pausing, pausing, and looking back. 

The day deepens, calmer is the calm. It is noon, and 
magnificent Dendereh stands inland on the desert edge of 
Libya, a temple of rare preservation, of Isis-headed columns, 
with the same portrait of Cleopatra upon the walls — a 
temple of silence, with dark chambers cool from the sun, 
and the sculptures in cabinet squares upon the wall. Let 
it float by, no more than a fleeting picture forever. It is 
St. Valentine's Day, but they are harvesting upon the 
shores, resting awhile now, till the sun is sloping. The 
shadeless Libyan and Arabian highlands glare upon the 
burning sun. The slow Sakias sing and sigh. The palms 
are moveless as in the backgrounds of old pictures. To 
our eyes it is perpetual picture slowly changing. The 
shore lines melt into new forms, other, yet the same. We 
know not if we wake or sleep, so dream-like exquisite is 
either sleeping or waking. 

The afternoon declines as we drift slowly under Aboo- 
fayda with a soft south wind. Its cliffs are like masses af 
old masonry, and wheeling hawks swoop downward to its 
sharp, bold peaks. Ducks are diving in the dark water of 
its shadow. The white radiance of the roou is more rosily 
tinged. Every form is fairer in the westering light. We 
left Asyoot yesterday, at evening we saw its many min- 
arets fade in the dark of the hills, like the strains of ara- 
besqued Arabian songs dying in the twilight, and at dusk a 



PER CONTRA. 309 



solitary jackal prowled stealthily along the shore. Joseph's 
brethren pass with camels and asses, to buy corn in Egypt. 
Geese in arrowy flight pierce the profound repose of the 
sky. Grolden gloom gathers in the palm-groves. Among 
the scaled trunks, like columns of a temple, passes a group 
of girls attending Pharaoh's daughter. Shall we reach 
the shore before her, and find the young Moses, Nile-nursed 
with the sweet sound of calmly flowing waters, and the 
sublime silence of the sky ? 

The sun sets far over Libya. He colors the death of 
the desert, as he tinges the live sea in his setting. Dark 
upon the molten west, in waving, rounding lines, the fading 
flights of birds are yet traced, seeking the rosy south, or 
following the sun. The day dies divinely as it lived. 
Primeval silence surrounded us all the time. What life 
and sound we saw and heard, no more jarred the silence, 
than the aurora lights the night. What a wild myth is 
wind ! Wind — wind, what is wind ? 

The dazzling moon succeeds, and the night is only a 
day more delicate. A solitary phantom barque glides sing- 
ing past — its sail as dark below as above, twin- winged in 
air and water. Whither, whither, ye ghostly mariners ? 
Why so sad your singing? Why so languid- weary the 
slow plash of oars ? 

The moon in rising glows over Antinoe, under whose 
palms we, float, and in the warm hush of the evening we 
see again, and now for the first time perfectly, the rounded 
ripeness of those lips, the divinely drooping lid, the matted 
curls clinging moist and close around the head and neck — 



310 NILE NOTES. 



the very soul of southern Antinous breathed over the Nile, 
The moon, striking the water, paves so golden a path to 
the shore that imagination glides along the dream, fades in 
Arabia, and gaining the Tigris — for the last time, incensed 
reader ! — pays court to the only caliph, and is entertained 
in that west-winded, rose-odored street, which the loves 
and lovers of the caliph know . 

— Or only the stars shine. Strange that in a land where 
stars shine without the modesty of mist, women vail their 
faces. Clearly Mohammad received his inspired leaves in 
a star-screened cave, and not in the full face of heaven. 
But let him still suspended be, for dimly glancing among 
the palms, silverly haloed by the stars that loved his 
manger — behold the young child and his mother with 
Joseph leading the ass, flying into the land. 

Tarry under the stars till morning, if you v(rill, seeing 
the pictures that earliest fancy saw, dreaming the dreams 
that make life worth the living. The midnight will be 
only weirder than the noon, not more rapt. Come, Com- 
mander, spread that divan into a bed. G-alleries of fairest 
fame are not all Raphaels, yet justly deserve their name, 
and so does our river life. 

Grood night, Pacha, the day was dreamier than your 
dreamiest dream. 



XLVI. 



" From the steep 

Of utmost Axume, until he spreads 

Like a calm flock of silver-fleeced sheep 
His waters on the plain ; and crested heads 

Of cities and proud temples gleam amid, 

And many a vapor-belted pyramid." 

" Memphis," said the Commander, as he was rubbing 
a spoon one morning, pointing with his thumb over his 
shoulder. 

The Howadji turned his eyes westward to behold mag- 
nificent Memphis — ^the last royal residence of genuine 
Egypt — ^the abode of Pharaohs and their queens — where 
Abraham left Sarah, when he went on to see the pyramids — 
a city built in the channel of the river, which was diverted 
by King Menes for that purpose. 

The Howadji looked to see the sacred lake over which 
the dead were ferried, and on whose farther shore sat the 
forty-two judges who decreed or denied the rites of burial. 
The Acherusian lake near Memphis surrounded, as the old 
Diodorus said, by beautiful meadows and canals, fringed 
with lotus and flowering rushes. It was a boat called Baris 



312 NILE NOTES. 



that performed this office and a penny was paid to the 
boatman named by the Egyptians, Charon. He says that 
Orpheus carried to Grreeoe the outlines of these stories, and 
Homer hearing, wrought them into the Grreek mythology. 

The Howadji looked to see the gorgeous temple of Isis 
and of Apis, the bull, who was kept in an inclosure, and 
treated as a god. He had a white mark on his forehead, 
and other small spots on his body, the rest being black. 
And when he died, another was selected, from having cer- 
tain signs, to take his place. 

He looked to see the ranges of palaces, which Strabo 
did not see until they were ruined and deserted, and all 
the pomp of royal and priestly and burial processions — the 
bearers of flowers, fruit and cakes that preceded — the 
friends in brilliant garments that followed — the strewers 
of palm-boughs that paved the way with smooth green, 
over which the funeral car slid more easily — barges of 
bouquets then, and groups of mourners — a high-priest 
burning incense over an altar and above, the images of 
serene Osiris and his cow-horned spouse. These were the 
pomps and shows he looked to see, and all the thousand 
glowing pictures of a realm without limit to the imagina- 
tion,-— luxuriant life developing in the most beautiful and 
brilliant display. And the Howadji turning, saw a few 
sand mounds and a group of pyramids upon the horizon. 

Nothing remains of Memphis but a colossus of Ramses, 
with his head deeply buried in the earth — overflowed 
yearly by the Nile, yet full of the same fascinating charac- 
ter — another representation of the old Egyptian type of 



MEMPHIS. 313 



beauty, shattered and submerged near a palm-shored lake. 
Past the lake we went, and over the broad belt -of green 
that separates the palms from the desert, and then up the 
steep sand slopes to the pyramids of Saccara. 

Standing at the foot of the largest, and looking desert- 
ward, the Howadji beheld a landscape which is unlike all 
others. Upon the chaotic desert that tumbles eastward 
from an infinite horizon, jagged in sandy billows, that 
seem, in huge recoil, back falling upon themselves at the 
edge of the green, rose the multitude of pyramids— twelve 
or more in number— near and far— dumb, inexplicable 
forms— like remains of a former creation that had en- 
dured, through strength, all intervening changes. Dim- 
mest, and farthest of all, the great pyramids of Grhizeh, 
looming in the faint haze of noon, like the relics of fore- 
world art, defying curiosity and speculation. The solid 
mass of these structures weighed palpably on the mind. 
A dead antediluvian silence settled around them, and 
seemed to benumb the faculties of the observer, unmooring 
him by its spell from the sentient sphere, to let him drift, 
aimless, and without guide, into black death and darkness. 
It was a basilisk fascination that held the eye to the sight. 
The pyramid-studded desert was the strange verge and ming- 
ling point of the dead and living worlds. Yet they stood 
there, telling no tales, and the eye at length released, 
slipped willingly far away over the palms and beheld the 
glittering minarets of Cairo. 

The mummy merchants were here at Saccara, and of- 
fered endless treasure of amulet and idol and jewel, and 

O 



3U I^ILE NOTES. 



from the great cat catacomb hard by, and the bh'd tombs, 
mummied cats and deified ibis done up in red pots, as the 
remains and memorials of mighty Memphis. 

The Howadji returned over the same glad, green plain. 
They had prowled into a brace of dark, dismal tombs, and 
leaned against a pyramid^ — had seen the beautiful statue, 
with the body broken, and the face hidden — a sad symbol — 
and the pleasant palms and sunny green slopes under them. 
They returned through the most spacious and beautiful of 
palm-groves. Forgive their eyes and imaginations that 
they lingered long in those beautiful reaches, avenues, and 
vistas. It was as if the genius of palms knew that his 
lovers were passing, and he unrolled and revealed his most 
perfect beauty as an adieu. It was a forest of the- finest 
palms, a tropic in itself — ^through whose foliage the blue 
sky streamed, and amid which bright birds flew. They 
are the last palms that shall be planted on these pages, 
and the last that shall fade from memory. The young 
ones seem not to expand from saplings into trees, but to 
spring, Minerva-like, fully formed and foliaged, through the 
earth, for they bear all their wide- waving crest of boughs 
when they first appear, and the trunk is so large that you 
fancy some gracious gnome, intent on adorning a world, is 
thrusting them by main force through the ground. As 
we reached the edge of this cheerful forest, we saw very 
plainly the white citadel of Cairo and its lofty minarets, 
high above the city. 

We slipped down to Grhizeh, and the next morning 
donkeyed quietly to the pyramids. Except for the sake of 



MEMPHIS. 315 



the Sphinx, the Howadji would only advise the visit to the 
scientific and curious, and is the more willing to say so, 
because he knows that every traveler would not fail to go. 
But the pyramids were built for the distant eye, and their 
poetic grandeur and charm belong to distance. When 
your eye first strikes them, as you come up from Alex- 
andria to Cairo, they stand vast, vague, rosy and distant, 
and are at once and entirely the Egypt of your dreams. 
The river winds and winds, and they seem to shift their 
places, to be now here, now there, now on the western 
shore, now on the eastern, until Egypt becomes to your 
only too glowing fancy, a bright day and a pyramid. 

Walk out beyond the village of Grhizeh at twilight 
then, and see them, not nearer than the breadth of the 
plain. They will seem to gather up the whole world into 
silence, and you will feel a pathos in their dumbness, 
quite below your tears. They have outlived speech, and 
are no more intelligible. Yet the freshness of youth still 
flushes in the sunset along their sides, and even these 
severe and awful forms have a beautiful bloom as of Hes- 
peridean fruit, in your memory and imagination. The 
Howadji may well learn with pleasure that the Cairo 
Bedlam is abolished, when he feels his memory putting 
the pyramids as flowers in her garden. For they are that. 
They are beautiful no less than awful, in remembrance. 

But as you approach, they shrink and shrink ; and 
when you stand at their bases and cast your eye to the 
apex, they are but vast mountains of masonry, sloping up- 
ward to the sky. Beastly Bedoueen, importunate for end- 



316 NILE NOTES. 



less bucksheesh, will pull you, breathless and angry, to the 
summit, and promise to run up and over all possible pyra- 
mids, and for aught you know, throw you across to the 
peaks of the Saccara cousins. Only threats most terrible, 
and entirely impossible of performance, can restore the ne- 
cessary silence. Express distinctly your determination to 
plunge every Bedoueen down the pyramid, when they 
have you dizzy and breathless and gasping on the sides 
as you go up from layer to layer, like stairs — swear 
horribly in your gasping and rage, that you will only 
begin by throwing them down, but conclude by annihi- 
lating the whole tribe who haunt the pyramids, and you 
work a miracle. For the Bedoueen become as placidly 
silent as if your threats were feasible, and only mutter 
mildly, " Bucksheesh, Howadji," like retiring and innocent 
thunder. 

There are, also, who explore the pyramids : who, from 
poetic or other motives, go into an utterly dark, hot and 
noisome interior, see a broken sarcophagus, feel that they 
are encased in solid masonry of some rods from the air, 
hear the howls of Bedoueen, and smell their odors, and re- 
turn faint, exhausted, smoke-blackened, with their pockets 
picked, and their nerves direfuUy disturbed. Poet Harriet 
advises none but firmly-nerved ladies to venture, and the 
Howadji may add the same advice to all but firmly-nerved 
men. To such, the exploration of the pyramids may be as 
it was to Nero — a grand and memorable epoch in life. For 
he said that he felt the greatness of old Egypt, more pro- 
foundly in the pyramids than anywhere else. 



MEMPHIS. 317 



Yet you must seek the pyramids, else would you miss 
the Sphinx, and that memory of omission would more 
sadly haunt you afterward, than her riddle haunted the 
old victims of her spells. 

The desert is too enamored of his grotesque darling, and 
gradually gathers around it, and draws it back again to his 
bosom. For it well seems the child of desert inspiration. 
Intense oriental imagination musing over the wonderful 
waste, would build its dreams in shapes as singular. It 
lies on the very edge of the desert, which recoils above the 
plain as at Saccara. The sand has covered it, and only 
head, neck and back are above its level. In vain Cavig- 
lia strove to stay the desert. More than half of the sand 
that he daily excavated, blew back again at night. 

The Sphinx, with raised head, gazes expectantly toward 
the East, nor dropped its eyes when Cambyses or Napoleon 
came. The nose is gone, and the lips are gradually going. 
The constant attrition of sand grains wears them away. 
The back is a mass of rock, and the temple between the 
fore-paws is buried forever. Still unread is my riddle, it 
seems to say, and looks, untiring, for him who shall solve 
it. Its beauty is more Nubian than Egyptian, or is rather" 
a blending of both. Its bland gaze is serious and sweet. 
Yet unwinking, unbending, in the yellow moonlight silence 
of those desert sands, will it breathe mysteries more magi- 
cal and rarer romances of the Mountains of the Moon and 
the Nile sources, than ever Arabian imagination dreamed. 
Be glad that the Sphinx was your last wonder upon the 
Nile, for it seemed to contain and express the rest. And 



318 



NILE NOTES. 



from its thinned and thinning lips, as you move back to 
the river with all Egypt behind you, trails a voice inaudi- 
ble, like a serpent gorgeously folding about your memory 
— Egypt and mystery, Sphinx ! 



XLVIL 

"Tired with the pomp of their Osirean feast." 

" With all Egypt behind yoUj" — so donkeyed the Ho- 
wadji from the Sphinx and the silence of the desert. They 
reached the shore and stepped upon the boat while the sun 
was wreaking all his glory upon the west. It burned 
through the trees and over the little town of Grhizeh, and 
its people and iilth, and as we moved into the stream, the 
pyramids occupied the west, unhurt for that seeing, large 
and eternal as ever, with the old mystery-^-the old charm. 

The river was full of boats, in the vicinity of the city. 
The wind blew gently from the north, and fleets of sails 
were stretching whitely southward. Even someTHowadji 
were just dotting down their first Nile note^; and we, mar- 
iners of two months, felt old and mature as we watched 
them. Had we not worshiped at Aboo Simbel '^nd con- 
quered the cataract, and heard Menihon, and stood on 
Memphis ? 

Back in that sunset came thronging the fairest images 
of the Nile ; and may sweet Athor, lovely Lady.af the West, 
enable you, retiring reader, to stand looking 1^'ok ward over 



320 



NILE NOTES. 



these pages, like the figure with which the Howadji's artist 
friend has graced this book's beginning, and behold a palni-. 
tree, or a rosy pyramid, or Memnon, or a gleam of sunshine 
brighter than our American wont, or the graceful Grhawazee 
beauty that the voyager so pleasantly remembers. 

— And you, Italian Nera, who ask if the sherbet of roses 
was indeed poured in a fountained kiosk of Damascus, you 
know that Hafiz long since sang to us, how sad were the 
sunset, were we not sure of a morrow. 




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Paper, 50 cents. 

Life and Writings of Cassius M. Clay ; 

Including Speeches and Addresses. Edited, with a Preface and 
Memoir, by Horace Greeley. With Portrait. 8vo, Muslin, 
$1 50. 

The Valley of the Mississippi. 

History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mis- 
sissippi, by the three great European Powers, Spain, France, and 
Great Britain ; and the subsequent Occupation, Settlement, and 
Extension of Civil Government by the United States, until the 
year 1846. By John W. Monette, Esq. Maps. 2 vols. 8vo, 
Muslin, $5 00 ; Sheep, $5 50. 

Southey's Life of John Wesley ; 

And Rise and Progress of Methodism. With Notes by the late 
Samuel T. Coleridge, Esq., and Remarks on the Life and Char- 
acter of John Wesley, by the late Alexander Knox, Esq. Ed- 
ited by the Rev. Charles C. Southey, M.A. Second American 
Edition, with Notes, &c., by the Rev. Daniel Curry. A.M. 2 
vols. 12mo, Muslin, $2 00. 

Pictorial History of England. 

Being a History of the People as well as a History of the' King- 
dom, down to the Reign of George III. Profusely Illustrated 
with many Hundred Engravings on Wood of Monumental Rec- 
ords ; Coins ; Civil and Military Costume ; Domestic Buildings, 
Furniture, and Ornaments ; Cathedrals and other great Works 
of Architecture ; Sports and other Illustrations of Manners ; Me- 
chanical Inventions ; Portraits of Eminent Persons ; and re- 
markable Historical Scenes. 4 vols, imperial 8vo, Muslin, $14 00 ; 
Sheep extra, $15 00; half Calf $16 00. 



6 Valuable Works on Biograplnj and History. 

Diplomatic and Official Papers of Daniel Web- 
ster, while Secretary of State. With Portrait. 8vo, Muslin, 
$1 75. 

Life of the Chevalier Bayard. 

By William G. Simms, Esq. Engravings. i2mo, Muslin, $1 00. 

History of Europe, 

From the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to 
the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815. By Archibald Ali- 
son, F.R.S. In addition to the Notes on Chapter LXXVL, 
which correct the errors of the original work concerning the 
United States, a copious Analytical Index has been appended 
to this American Edition. 4 vols. 8vo, Muslin, $4 75 ; Sheep 
extra, $5 00. 

Boswell's Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. With numerous 
Additions and Notes, by John W. Croker, LL.D. A new Edi- 
tion, entirely revised, with much additional Matter. Portrait. 
2 vols. 8vo, Muslin, $3 75 ; Sheep, $3 00. 

Life and Speeches of John C. Calhoun. 

With Reports and other Writings, subsequent to his Election as 
Vice-president of the United States ; including his leading Speech 
on the late War, delivered in 1811. 8vo, Mus^lin, $1 12^. 

Life of Charlemagne. 

With an Introductory View of the History of France. By G. P. 
R. James, Esq. 18mo, Muslin, 45 cents. 

Life of Henry IV., 

King of France and Navarre. By G. P. R. James, Esq. 2 vols. 
12mo, Muslin, $2 50. 

History of Chivalry and the Crusades. 

By G. P. R. James, Esq. Engravings. 18mo, Muslin, 45 cents. 

Neal's History of the Puritans, 

Or, Protestant Non-conformists ; from the Reformation in 1518 
to the Revolution in 1688 ; comprising an Account of their Prin- 
ciples, Sufferings, and the Lives and Characters of their most 
considerable Divines. With Notes, by J. O. Choules, D.D. 
With Portraits. 2 vols. 8vo, Muslin, $3 50 ; Sheep, $4 00. 

Neander's Life of Christ ; 

In its Historical Connections and its Historical Development. 
Translated from the Fourth German Edition, by Professors 
M'Clintock and Blumenthal, of Dickinson College. 8vo, Mus- 
lin, $2 00 ; Sheep extra, $2 25. 

Lives of Celehrated British Statesmen. 

The Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England ; with a Treat- 
ise on the popular Progress in English History. By John Fors- 
TER. Edited by the Rev. J, 0. Choules. Portraits. 8vo, Mus- 
lin, $1 75 ; Sheep, $2 00. 



% Kcto tUork on Spain. 
GLIMPSES OF SPAII; 

: ORj NOTES OF AN UNFINISHED TOUR IN 18 4 7. 

BY S. T. WALLIS, ESQ. 

12mo, paper, 75 cents ; muslin, |1 00 



Its felicitous sketches, its piquancy of narrative, and accuracy of obser- 
vation, we may venture to predict will give it a high position among the 
best books of travel of the day, excellent as some of these have been of late 
years. — Ballimore American. 

We should be pleased if all travelers were as entertaining as Wallis, and 
all " Notes" as racy and new as these " Glimpses of Spain." — Lit. American. 

We venture to predict for this volume a very large shai-e of public favor, 
which we think it most fully deserves. ** * * An agreeable and clever work. 
We repeat that we rarely stumble on one of its kind that has afforded us 
so much pleasure. — Albion. 

These " Grlimpses" do credit to the eye which saw and the pen which 
describes them, Mr. Wallis treats of Spain and Spaniards as they are, not 
as they are not. — Boston Post. 

The author is an intelligent and well-read man, and tells his story in a 
very animated manner. He is disposed to take a very favorable view of 
Spanish character and manners, the effect of which is to render his book the 
more interesting. — New York Observer. 

A sensible, well-written, and highly entertaining volume, embodying ma- 
tured and comprehensive views with interesting personal incident. — Sotith- 
ern Christian Advocate. 

It furnishes a rich intellectual treat. — Methodist Protestant. 

It is written with clearness, and in a most agreeable style, which famil- 
iarizes, so to speak, the reader with the subject of which it ti'eats, and car- 
ries him on his journey as if he were really making it himself, so skiUfuUy 
and yet so artlessly is the narrative given. — Baltimore Patriot. 

The book abounds with interest and amusement. — Freeman's Journal. 

We like this book exceedingly. All the author says is full of sense, and 
heart, and purpose. Of all the books we have ever read on Spain, commend 
us to this one. — Christian Alliance. 

It is characterized by a close observation of all material facts and inci- 
dents, a liberal view of existing institutions, and a style easy, graceful, and 
readable in a high degree. — Methodist Quarterly Revietc. 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PU BLISHERS, NEW YORK. 



Bu tl)e ^utl)ot- of "banitj) fair." 
THE HISTORY OF PENDEIIIS: 

HIS FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES, HIS FRIENDS AND 
HIS GREATEST ENEMY. 

BY W. M. THACKEEAY, ESQ. 

Witfi illustrations 62 t|)c ^tttl)ov. 

IN SEVEN NUMBERS, 25 CENTS EACH, OR TWO VOLS. MUSLIN, $2 50. 



— — ~**#A/\/^Ml\/'^>/\<VS<> 



As true to the life and as bitingly satirical as "Vanity Fair." — Lit. Mes. 

Thackeray must take his stand at the head of the prose satirists, if not of 
the novelists, of the day. No one describes the scenes and manners of so- 
ciety with such curious felicity. — Washington Republic. 

In satire he has had no superior since the days of Fielding. — Hold. Rev. 

We recognize in "Pendennis" the able and vigorous intellect which 
evinced so intimate a knowledge of life and such inimitable powers of por- 
traiture in "Vanity Fail*." — London Morning Herald. 

Here is a book to drive away melancholy. It is by that most laughter- 
moving writer of the age, Thackeray, and those who read it must laugh, be 
they ever so melancholy. We recognize every where the pen of the author 
of " Vanity Fair," and are by no means displeased with the acquaintanc-e. — 
Western Continent. 

To all who have read " Vanity Fair" or " The Great Hoggarty Diamond," 
the very name of Thackeray is suggestive of the good things contained in 
any book he may choose to write. Thackeray's sympathies are all health- 
ful and invigorating ; he is the swoi-n enemy of all humbug and pretension, 
and the good-humored but effective satire with which he assails them has 
rendered him one of the most popular writers of the day. — N. Bed. Mercury. 

Replete with truthful delineations of character and sparkling with the 
coruscations of wit and humor. — Commercial Advertiser. 

No recent fiction seems to us to bear such inti-insic evidence of being drawn 
from life. — Home Journal. 

He (Thackeray) is caustic in satire, and at the same time witty and hu- 
morous, original and instructive. Fielding led the way in English works 
of fiction painted from nature ; and Dickens and Thackeray are worthy suc- 
cessors of the great father of the English novel. — Baltimore American. 

Thackeray pictures society in all its phases in a graphic, sarcastic, and yet 
genial manner. — Transcript. 

We cheerfully commend it to every man who would refresh his rceollec- 
tions of his boyish freaks and fancies of love-making. — National Era. 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK. 



THE PICTOEIAL FIELD-BOOE: 

OF 

THE HEYOLUTIOI; 

OR, ILLUSTRATIONS, BY PEN AND PENCIL, OF THE HISTORY, SCENERY, 

BIOGRAPHY, RELICS, AND TRADITIONS OF THE 

WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE. 

BY BENSON J. lOSSING, ESQ. 

WITH 600 ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD, BY LOSSING AND BARRITT, CHIEFLY 
FROM ORIGINAL SKETCHES BY THE AUTHOR. 



This elegant work, issued semi-monthly, will be completed in about twen- 
ty NUMBERS, containing forty -eight large octavo pages each, at twenty -five 
CENTS a number. It is a pictorial and descriptive record of a journey, recent- 
ly performed, to all the most important historical localities of the American 
Revolution. The plan is unique and attractive, embracing the character- 
istics of a booh of travel and a history. 

The historical portions of the narrative, which are written in a clear and 
lively style, are interspersed with descriptions of scenery, personal adven- 
tures, amusing incidents, and piquant sketches of character, giving a perpet- 
ual interest to the work, like that of the journal of a popular tourist. Who- 
ever would refresh his knowledge of the scenes and characters of the Rev- 
olution, should not fail to watch for the appearance of these atti'active and 
delightful numbers. — Neto York Tribune. 

The first number of a serial so adapted to the popular wants and taste, 
that we predict for it a success greater than that which attended either the 
"Pictorial Bible" or " Shakspeare." It is called the "Pield-Book of the 
Revolution," and is made up of the main incidents of that memorable period, 
clearly narrated from authentic som-ces. The wood engravings are in the 
highest style of the art, and gi-acefully interspersed amid the text ; the pa- 
per and piint are beautiful, the subject universally attractive, the price of 
the work remarkably low, and its consequent great success certain. — Home 
Journal. 

We hail the appearance of this work with gi-eat pleasure, and doubt not 
the accomplished author will, with his well-known genius, do fall justice to 
his noble theme both with "pen and pencil," which he knows so well how 
to handle. — Albany Atlas. 

We have no hesitation in saying that it will be, when completed, one of 
the most attractive works ever published in America. — Troy Budget. 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK. 



CnntiDimtiBit nf liliittli'B ^tiit^i ItntBS. 
THE HISTORY 

OF THE 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

FROM 

THE ADOPTION OF THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION TO 

THE END OF THE SIXTEENTH CONGRESS. 

BY RICHARD HILDRETH, ESQ. 



This work is to be completed in Three Volumes, uniform in style and 
price with the author's earlier history, of which it forms a continuation. 
The accuracy of research and impartiality of statement which mark the 
volumes which have already appeared, have been recognized by the Press, 
of all shades of opinion, and in every section of the country ; and they have 
taken their place as a standard authority in reference to the period of 'which 
they treat. 

His work fills a want, and is, therefore, most welcome. Its positive merits, in 
ftdditiou to those we have before mentioned, are impartiality, steadiness of view, 
clear appreciation of character, and, in point of style, a terseness and conciseness 
not unlike Tacitus, with not a little, too, of Tacitean vigor of thought, stera sense 
of justice, sharp irony, and profoimd wisdom. — Methodist Quarterly Reviev,. 

It occupies a space which has not yet been filled, and exhibits characteristics 
both of design and of composition which entitle it to a distinguished place among 
the most important productions of American genius and scholarship. We wel- 
come it as a simple, faithful, lucid, and elegant narrative of the gi'eat events of 
American history. It is not written in illusti-ation of any favorite theory, it is 
not the expression of any ideal system, but an honest endeavor to present the 
facts in question in the pure, uncolored light of truth and reality. The impartial- 
ity, good judgment, penetration, and diligent research of the author are conspic- 
uous in its composition. — iV. Y. Tribune. 

We value it on account of its impartiality. We have found nothing to indi- 
cate the least desire on the part of the author to exalt or debase any man or any 
party. His veiy patriotism, though high-principled and sincere, is sober and dis- 
criminate, and appears to be held in strong check by the controlHng recollection 
that he is writing for postexity, and that if the facts which he publishes will not 
honor his country and his countrymen, fulsome adulation will not add to their 
gloi-y. No American library will be complete without this work. — Commercial. 

Decidedly superior to any thing that before existed on American history, and 
a valuable contribution to American scholarship. — Biblical Repo&itory. 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK. 



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